How to Reclaim Your Identity as a Man and a Dad – Letting Go of your Ego (U2.0 Series)

Have you ever felt the weight of fatherhood pushing you into a mold that doesn't quite fit? In our latest episode of "15 Minutes with Dad," we promise to show you how dropping the ego can help you reclaim your identity as a father. Join us as we explore transformative strategies that emphasize presence over productivity and redefine what it means to be an intentional parent. Inspired by Jim Murphy's "Inner Excellence," we discuss how fathers can shift from seeking approval to living with purpose, ultimately embodying their inherent worth rather than striving to prove it. Dive into personal stories that highlight the power of simple, mindful moments with our children, and discover how letting go of control can foster deeper connections.

This episode is designed to challenge conventional perceptions of fatherhood. We dig into the concept of mastering your inner game, building emotional resilience, and recognizing your intrinsic value beyond external accolades. Each chapter of our discussion offers practical insights and challenges you to apply these principles in your daily life. Listen along as we navigate through the complexities of ego-driven parenting, co-parenting challenges, and the journey towards becoming the best version of ourselves. We invite you to engage with our community and share how these lessons resonate with you, because at the heart of it all, your worth lies in who you are, not in what you prove.

Chapters

• 0:00 Reclaiming Fatherhood
• 15:08 Embracing Present Fatherhood
• 21:01 Mastering Inner Game

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:51

Welcome back to 15 Minutes with Dad, the podcast designed to empower fathers with real, practical strategies to grow, lead and show up as the best version of themselves. I'm your host, lyric Williams, a career visual and performing artist, professional data system director and author, but, more importantly, a father who's been navigating the ups and downs of blended family life with four kids. Today we are continuing the you 2.0 series with episode two Reclaiming your Identity as a Father, letting Go of Ego and Embracing your True Self. This episode is all about shedding the need for external validation, breaking free from ego-driven fatherhood and discovering who you are at your core. If you've ever felt like you're constantly proving your worth to your kids, your partner, your ex or even to yourself, this episode is for you.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Fatherhood comes with a set of expectations, some of them placed on us by society, some by family and some by ourselves. The role of dad often feels like a title. We have to constantly prove we deserve, we grind, we sacrifice, we push through, and yet sometimes it never feels like enough. Why? Because too many fathers, including myself, at times, fall into a trap of tying our work to external validation how much we provide, how strong we appear or how well we perform as dads. This is where the concept of ego attachment comes in. Ego is not just arrogance. It's the part of us that clings to identity labels for validation. Arrogance, it's the part of us that clings to identity labels for validation. It's the voice in your head that says if I'm not doing everything perfectly, I'm failing. So why is it important? Because when we let ego control our fatherhood, we continue to become reactive instead of intentional. We make choices based on what we think will earn approval instead of what's truly best for us and our children. For instance, if your children get mad and they get upset and they catch a tantrum and you go and say, okay, all right, all right, just go ahead, because you don't want to feel like a bad parent, you don't want to be the bad guy. Or maybe you're having issues with the mother of your child and you try to keep peace and you'd be like all right, yeah, man, like she just got through saying some really crude things and you don't set boundaries. In those moments you kind of just like all right, all right, I just want to. Let's just keep the peace, I don't want any problems. And this isn't just my opinion. Experts like Jim Murphy and his book Inner Excellence, talk about how high performers, whether in sports, business or life, achieve greatness by detaching from ego and focusing on purpose, and I personally believe that this same principle applies to fatherhood.

Speaker 1: 3:52

Now let's talk about the struggle. Too many fathers spend their lives trying to validate their worth to the people around them. We prove our worth to our children by giving them things instead of presence. We prove our worth to our partners by carrying burdens alone instead of communicating. We prove our worth to our exes by trying to outdo them or prove we're still good enough. We prove our worth to ourselves by constantly chasing perfection. But here's the truth your worth as a father is not something you earn. It's something you embody. Your kids don't need a superhero. They don't need perfection. They need you present, authentic and growing. So how do we break free from ego-driven fatherhood? Let's turn to Jim Murphy's Inner Excellence for five powerful insights. This stuff has changed my life and how I approach my relationship with my girlfriend. How do I approach my relationship with my children, and where do I teach from? They have some really key, essential lessons that come along that's based into Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as well as the keys to high-performing individuals. So let's talk about these five lessons.

Speaker 1: 5:11

Jim Murphy's book Inner Excellence is all about mastering the mind, controlling emotions and detaching from outcomes. Here are five key lessons from the book that we, as fathers, can use to break free from ego and become more present, intentional dads. The first thing is shift your focus from approval to purpose. Lift your focus from approval to purpose. Your ego was saying sometimes is I need my kids, my partners or others to see me as a great dad Boy? That particular statement has riddled through my life for the whole chunk of my earlier years. I'm proving to myself that I'm a good dad, others that I'm a good dad. But at this age now, as I've gone through change and shift and transformation, when someone says you're a good dad, I'm like no, I'm just a dad. That's being the type of dad that my kid needs.

Speaker 1: 6:07

But let's see what the inner excellent teaches the book Inner Excellence. It says true, greatness comes when you focus on purpose over perception. But how do we apply this? As a dad, you can ask yourself daily am I making decisions based on my values or just trying to impress others? And when you lead with purpose, approval becomes absolutely irrelevant. Purpose approval becomes absolutely irrelevant, like when you ask yourself am I making decisions based on my values At this point in time in my fatherhood? I stand on my values. I stand on business when it comes to my values and the values that I teach my family Like I teach my families very much, so that words are very powerful. You know, there's that little thing. You know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. That's not true. Words are extremely powerful, as you see the rhetoric around this country right now, as well as how people are being affected directly from how you speak to them, and words are very important. So that's a value that I preach to my family but I also exercise in my regular everyday life.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Let's talk about the second lesson from inner excellence of letting go of your ego. In fatherhood. Master the power of detachment. But I was talking to my brother about this earlier today and I was like and the mother of your child will continuously have control over you, your emotions, if you're not seeing your child this week or whatever that may be, detach yourself from the feelings of how it makes you feel Like, yes, it sucks, but when you detach from that, you take away the power that she has over you and when it comes to your kids, if your kids are telling you, no, I hate you, dad, or I don't like detach. Detach from how it makes you feel. There's a sense of empathy that goes along in that, but detach yourself from what is being said. So the ego would say if things don't go this way or my way, I failed. But in the inner excellence it says that the best performers don't obsess over outcomes. They stay focused on the process.

Speaker 1: 8:57

But as a dad, instead of stressing about whether you're the perfect father, focus on being a present father. Your effort and consistency matters more than perfection, father. Your effort and consistency matters more than perfection For all you new dads out there. You want to do right by your child. You want to do better than your dad did with you. You want to be the best father that you can possibly be. And I will tell you you will not be the best father that you think you could be, because you're going to get things wrong. You're going to get a lot of things wrong and you have to embrace that. You're going to get things wrong, you're going to say the wrong things, you're going to react the wrong way, but it's absolutely vital that you remember. It's not about doing everything perfect. You've got to get it right most of the time. When you're a good parent, you will get it right most of the time, but not all of the time. And so trying to be a perfect father is only going to set you up for failure, because being a perfect father is arbitrary. There's no actual framework or book that says if you accomplish these tasks then you are a perfect father. There is none. Your child needs you for where they are and who they are, and you have to be able to be moldable as a dad throughout the entire process.

Speaker 1: 10:23

There's different age groups. I kind of break it down into different age groups, of childhood to teenager, because I have a teenager now. But from the ages of like one to seven, let's say they're a sponge. They're learning things. You're instilling them. They see everything linearly. Everything you say is right. My dad said this. This is how it is.

Speaker 1: 10:46

When they get nine like eight through 10, they start wondering about the world around them. Their minds kind of expand a little bit. They start learning about numbers and how big things are, and then they look at how small they are and then they have to try to find their identity, and that's when it's really good for dads to be very, very diligent about making sure that they understand what makes them them, what makes people different and what makes them special. When they become a teenager, they become abstract thinkers. They start thinking about oh my God, what is life and why am I alive and why is this and all of that? And it's important that you change.

Speaker 1: 11:26

And the only reason I said about these phases is because it's important that you are moldable as a parent, as a father, through each of those stages. You cannot be the same dad you were for the seven-year-old to the teenager Now. I will argue that the toddler and the teenagers are just the same, just bigger words and bigger emotions and you know, more attitude. But other than that, teenagers and toddlers are the same. My daughter would totally hate me for saying that, but I say that because you have to mold. You have to be able to not become the perfect dad, but try to be the best version of a dad that your child needs. Try to be the best version of a dad that your child needs.

Speaker 1: 12:11

So let's go to the third lesson of inner excellence, and the third lesson is reframe failure as growth. This kind of comes off of what I was just talking about, of you getting it right most of the time, but not all of the time, and every time you fail, every time you fail, you learn something new about your child. There's times when I've talked bad to my daughter and I was like, oh wait, I didn't mean to say that and I apologize, but I'm like, okay, but I did. I was trying to say this, like I may not have come out right saying it, I may have said it at the wrong time, but this is what I was trying to get at and I'd love you and like you know, like that's usually a lot about what I do as a father. But reframing your failure as growth and your ego may say every mistake that you make means that you are not a good dad and I will assure you every mistake that you make will be a learning lesson.

Speaker 1: 13:08

The mother of your child or the father of your parent, your parent, your co-parent, may tell you you're a deadbeat, you're terrible at this, because you've messed this up and you're going to ruin our child forever. I can assure you there's a lot of time in that child's life and that one mistake that you made won't tear it. It's how you deal with it that really makes the difference. You imprint when you deal with things and how you deal with them. They see that. But what does inner excellence teach us? The best growth comes from learning through failure. It means we have to embrace it, and when you embrace the fact that you may make mistakes, you give yourself the grace and the peace to really learn your child and be the best version of a father that they need. But how do we apply this? So when you mess up whether it's losing patience or making a bad call just own it and learn from it and show your kids that growth is more important than getting it right the first time.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I know that we want our kids to be a perfect emulation of how we envision them to be. They won't be that. They will do everything they can not to be the thing that we've thought that they should be. And what I've learned is that when I came into approaching my teenagers, thinking oh, this is how I've always seen you when I tell you, a teenager will completely ruin the image that you have of them in a good way, because then you get to see them for who they are and love them and cherish them in that level. But know that it's not about getting it right the first time. It's about growing and learning how to do it better when that time arises. So let's go to four Be present, not just productive. And that is a very interesting point, because when you're a high performer or you do well at work, you think that you got to do a lot as well as a parent.

Speaker 1: 15:08

And I'm going to tell you a story. Before I get deep into this point, this point, I'm going to preface it with a story. The story is I was in a car with a girl that I liked at the time and she said this thing to me. We were talking about like I was upset about how my relationship with my daughter was, and she kind of told me like hey, why you do all these big things when you go see your daughter? And I was like because I'm missing time with her and I want her to know that I love her. She was like kids don't care. Kids don't care about the big stuff, they just want to go to the grocery store with you, they just want to hang out with you. And when I tell you that, I don't even know if she knows how much that statement profoundly changed how I approach fatherhood. She was like no, like me and my dad, I just like hanging out with my dad, like just being around him, like I don't. You know, he doesn't have to buy me things but I used to think like yo, I've missed so much time. My kid is going to miss me. I need to imprint something on them that they remember me by, and it has to be a big memory. My daughter doesn't even remember half the crap that I spent money on to go to, but she does remember how I made her feel when we would go on daddy-daughter dates. We would go dancing, we would go to shows together. She remembers those things.

Speaker 1: 16:34

And so let's talk about number four be present and not just productive. The ego may tell you I need to do more to prove that I'm valuable, I need to do more to prove that I'm worthy or worth this love. But what inner excellence teaches is that your power is in the present moment, not in chasing more. And I need to remind you this episode is about letting go of the ego and embracing your true self and number four is profound and about how you embrace your true self. Your power is in the present moment, not in chasing more, but how do you apply it? As a dad, instead of measuring your success by how much you do for your kids, how much you do for your family, how much you do for your wife, your daughter, your son, focus on simply being with them.

Speaker 1: 17:40

Even 15 minutes of intentional presence is more impactful than hours of distracted time, simply being and not just sitting there, because a lot of us just sit there, get up, be present and savor the moment. And my therapist told me this thing and I saved this thing and you probably hear it on different episodes. But in order to create a memory, sometimes you got to put sensory to it Taste, feel, sight, hear, sniff. I mean, 15 minutes of just any time, of just talking to them would do a big difference. And for me this year I've made a goal to speak and sit down with my kids, to talk for at least 15 minutes with each of them, whether they're the five-year-old, the four-year-old turning five-year-old or the 16-year-old, but spending time and having uninterrupted conversations with them, and it's gone a long way. Conversations with them, and it's gone a long way. So let's go to number five Surrender, control and trust the process.

Speaker 1: 18:53

Our ego will tell us that we have to control everything to protect our kids and to protect the image of the role of dad. Your role as a father does not need to be protected. Your kids may need to be protected and you may want to go in like, oh, she's talking about me to my kids, she's trying to change them on me, and I need to go in like fight for that honor. That ego is what get fathers in trouble, because you feel like you have to go and prove to your kids that you are not what the mother says you are. Detach, surrender, control and trust the process. What inner excellence teaches us is that true strength comes from trusting the process and letting go of what you can't control. And if co-parenting is a perfect, if life throws unexpected challenges at you, just breathe. Focus on what you can control, like your attitude, your presence and your love for your kids, and the rest will fall into place. Fatherhood is not about proving yourself. It's about showing up every day as the best version of who you are and who your children need you to be.

Speaker 1: 20:18

We talked about how seeking validation can trap us in ego-driven fatherhood and how lessons from inner excellence can help us break free by shifting our focus to purpose, detaching from outcomes, reframing the failure as success, and being fully present and surrendering control. So here's your challenge for the week Pick one of these five lessons and apply it in your daily life, whether it's letting go of needing approval, focusing on the present or releasing the need for control. Start small and take that first step towards you 2.0. And if you're enjoying this series, make sure you visit 15minuteswithdadcom for my insights, tools and ways to apply these principles to your fatherhood journey. And ways to apply these principles to your fatherhood journey.

Speaker 1: 21:01

Next week, we're going to be talking about how to master the inner game, emotional resilience and clarity. Don't forget to subscribe to 15 Minutes with Dad on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on social media at 15 Minutes with Dad for more content. And if any of these lessons apply to you today, let us know how by making a video and tagging us in at 15 minutes with dad on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook. At 15 minutes with dad. So until next time, remember your value isn't in what you prove. It's in who you are. So keep leading, keep growing and keep showing up.