The Whole Parent Podcast

Driver, Parenting Type Series #61

• Jon Fogel - WholeParent

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In this episode, Jon introduces the Driver parent: the caregiver who leads with momentum, decisiveness, and an instinct to move things forward. Grounded in the belief that safety comes from action, he explores how strength can quietly turn into control when vulnerability feels risky. Parents will walk away with language for their leadership instincts, insight into how power and connection can coexist, and reassurance that slowing down doesn’t diminish their strength—it makes it usable.

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Welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John, and you have made it to a unique episode, unless you have listened to the last two, in that we are talking about parenting types. And if you've never heard these types before, I'm not surprised because I made them up. I spent over a hundred hours working on categorizing parents into four primary parenting types. It's kind of a cross-section or an amalgamation of typical personality typing systems. And then I crafted a quiz which you can take below. You can go and find that in the show notes, where you can uh in 20 questions identify your parenting type. And that's why this episode feels a little bit different. Usually in episodes, I either have it scripted out or I'm answering parent questions or I have a specific topic. The topic today is talking about the third of the four types. This type is the type that I have identified as the driver, the driver type. And this episode and the next episode, as well as the previous two episodes, are all about individual types. So why should you listen to this if you haven't taken the quiz yet? Because it might help you to understand and identify whether you are a driver type, even if that's not the result that you get in the quiz. I have not had a problem so far with the quiz being accurate. In fact, basically everybody who's taken the quiz, since it's many variations and testing periods and trial and error periods, but the current quiz that I have up, basically everybody who's taken it has said, yeah, this actually fits me really well. And so I'm not, I am not worried that you're gonna get the wrong type. But even if you don't come back with a driver type, it may be that you have some driver tendencies. And even more important, it is almost sure that somebody in your life, more importantly, in your kid's life, is a driver. And so if you want to go back and listen to the previous two episodes or the next episode, those are the other three types. Guardians and nurturers were the ones that we've already done. And as we and seekers are the ones that we are yet to do. That's gonna be tomorrow's episode. If you're listening to this in sequence as they come out in the next episode, if you're uh just following along and you're listening to this after the fact. But you should listen to all four episodes because number one, like I said, there's gonna be people like that in your life. And number two, it may be that your parents fall into these categories. And as we talk about the strengths and then the areas for growth, growth, the growing edges, uh, maybe even the weaknesses, the neuroses that these types come out with, it might give you some language to understand how you were raised as well. And that's a big part of this. Understanding your parenting type is about understanding those childhood experiences that grew you into the person that you are today. Not that that's forever who you are. We all change and we all adjust, but uh there are some things, there are some tendencies, there are some personality traits which tend to come through. And so without further ado, if you're ready to hear more about the driver type, let's get into it. Welcome back out to the porch. It uh I usually give my daily or nightly weather report. I'd say we are at a medium temperature here out here on the porch. It's probably in the low 50s out here, which is just fine for me because I got a um a hot dog heater. That's those like an infrared heater, like the ones that they have at the bus stop or that they that they have at the speedway or the gas station that keeps the hot dogs warm. That's why I call it a hot dog heater. And I feel like a little hot dog, just like rotating on the on the rollers right now. And I also have underneath my feet, people asked me, somebody sent me a text. Did you know that you can send a text below in the show notes? You can send me a text, and it comes directly to me, doesn't go to anybody else. Somebody sent me a text that said, I can't believe that you're out there on the porch still. Your feet must be freezing. To which I responded, number one, I have good slippers and I wear good socks. Number two, I have this um anti-fatigue pad that I stand on or that I I have my feet on, and it has an inbuilt heater, so I can jack up my my heat my foot pad to 140 degrees, and that keeps my toes warm, even on days like today where I'm not wearing my very sturdy slippers because I don't know where they are. There's somewhere around here. We cleaned up the house today, and uh sometimes things get put misplaced. Anyway, we're talking about drivers, and we're talking about the type that often gets, I think, the worst rap by other types. So one thing that I've I've talked about in the in the previous two episodes, and I'm sure I will talk about tomorrow with seekers, is that often we will, when we hear a type, it'll stick out to us. The the type that sticks out to us is like, ooh, all of those problems that that type has, those are really like big problems. And I think those are the worst. This that's probably the worst type to be. Oftentimes, what I find is that if people listen and and learn about the types first, like for example, my membership has had access to the parenting types for longer, much longer than all of you on the podcast. Obviously, this is the first podcast I'm doing, series that I'm doing about it, as I release the quiz out into the world for people to take in large, in mass. But people have come back and said, Oh man, I really hoped that I wasn't a nurturer. I really hope that I wasn't a driver. I really hope because those problems that they have feel so bad. And it's because those we are always most critical of ourselves. And so we often will say, like, oh man, the problems that those nurturers have, or the problems that those guardians have, or the problems that those seekers have, those are the worst because that's actually what we are. The one exception here is that drivers often don't see their issues as like problems. They a lot of times they will see their growing edges and go, like, yeah, that's just what being a good parent is. But often other people will see drivers and go, ooh, I wouldn't, and that's that seems a little rough. It's kind of harsh. And that is kind of my uh opening here. There is strengths and weaknesses to all types, as I've been talking about so far. One of the weaknesses with drivers is that they tend to be a little bit of harsh. They tend to be a little harsh. Uh, they tend to be a little bit more authoritarian. And so I'm very much expecting for many of us to listen to this episode and hear that this is what our parents were, especially if we were raised during the era that most of us who are listening now, who have kids who are young now, were where parents were a little bit more authoritarian. They were a little bit more, you know, hey, do what I said because I said so. That is a driver line, if I've ever heard one. And so I want to start with a couple of strengths. I I I should have said I'm gonna start with a couple strengths and then not immediately named one of their key weaknesses, which is that they can tend to be a little bit harsh. Um, but I want to start with one of their strengths, or even maybe two of their strengths, and then get into my five pillars, the things that kind of hold this up. And my first one is that they have a strength to, they have a capacity to act under pressure. They have a capacity to act under pressure. So when the stakes get high for driver parents, they make decisions, orient quickly, and in moments of chaos, they tend to like the world for them slows down and they immediately can provide direction. So the way that this might act out in the world outside of uh parenting, for example, is that a driver might see that like there's nobody taking charge in a given situation, and they'll step into that leadership role because under those high pressure scenarios, they tend to thrive. And this is why I imagine that a lot of professional athletes are drivers. Like, if if you think about them, the when the stakes get really high, the best professional athletes rise to that occasion, and they wouldn't be professional athletes if they didn't, right? If they didn't perform better under pressure than like in the moments of kind of lukewarm nothingness. The ability to act under pressure is a massive asset, and that can be really positive for drivers because in moments of true chaos, like when something really bad does happen with your kid, they can feel that leadership come through and that direction come through. The problem is not everything needs to be a crisis, and often drivers kind of have a little bit of a tendency to take it easy when there isn't a crisis. And so they they either turn something into a crisis, they allow it to become a crisis by not acting, or they turn something into a crisis by over-reacting. And so this is a this is a positive and a negative, but I think that I want to start with it as a strength primarily because the capacity to act under pressure is something that some of the other types really struggle to do. Like guardians, for example, as we already have talked about, they will often try and create perfect scenarios and perfect systems that that the chaos will never happen. Nurturers will often like kind of try and diffuse the chaos because they don't want anybody to be upset, and so they just like get codependent within the chaos. Seekers, as we'll talk about tomorrow, will often avoid the chaos or will kind of just say, Well, I'm not gonna deal with that right now. I'm just gonna go off and do something else. Um, they'll ignore the chaos. And the the really the strength here is that if there is a situation where there is chaos and there needs to be somebody who takes charge, the driver can step in and act in that way. And so my first pillar that I want to talk about is this concept of where they establish safety. And so you've heard these in the five pillars previously, and you'll hear this with seekers, but where do they feel safety come through? And with guardians, it was safety and control and and nurtures, it was safety within uh like relationship and safety within like regulation and co-regulation for drivers, it's safety through dominance and momentum, and I and I don't want to like say dominance as this like horrible, horrible thing, because I think often we maybe the word isn't even dominance, it's like dominion. But it like really the concept is like if you if I can stay in control of my environment, not necessarily like being controlling, but if I can like stay in control by like never showing weakness, then I can kind of handle any problem that comes towards me. And this in this way, there's also a tendency, like I said, it's also it's dominance, but it's also momentum. There's also this tendency that stillness and peacefulness, all of those things that the nurturer sought for and was trying to get, and the guardian is trying to like create systems to create these peaceful environments, those things can kind of paradoxically or or or not paradoxically, but um in in a partnership relationship where you have the other parent is a driver or another caregiver is driver, they look at that peacefulness and they're like, oh man, this is like I feel like if I'm not moving forward, I'm slowing down. Like if this, if there was an animal associated with the driver, it would be a shark. Because, you know, they take charge and they, you know, kind of they're they're they're they can be vicious when they need to be, but they always keep moving forward, and that's the key, right? They're never ever losing ground, they're always stepping forward and moving into like the next thing, and that can create some good and some bad. On the good, you never have to worry about your child like falling behind, whether that's academics or or in the world, like in relationships or in athletics. Drivers are not always constantly forcing their children to perform, but they're always wanting their kid to like learn and do the next thing. Like, all right, let's move and let's get let's get to the next thing. Let's let's let's okay, we've mastered this, let's move up to the next level. We've mastered this, let's move up to the next level. And when pressure comes, it's like great, the pressure is here, all good, let's move to the next level. And that can be a really positive thing for kids because kids do well when they are presented with uh, you know, uh growth, and that's an important part of being a kid. It can also be a detriment when a kid might be still taking in information, and they kids don't tend to do well with novelty, they want repetition and they want just established routines, they don't want the routines to change. Oftentimes, and this is true also for the seeker that we'll talk about tomorrow. Oftentimes, routines can kind of get in the way of a driver's desire to move things forward. Like a routine is is an example of something that we already have mastered. Why are we still worried about this? Why are we still doing this? We're supposed to be moving forward. We're supposed to, we like if staying still, not moving is death. Like you want to keep going forward. Stillness is dangerous. And so, as long as you it can often come off as this tendency towards dominance. Like, I need to control my environment. And it's again, it's not controlling your environment through organization, it's controlling your environment through sheer force of will. And this makes drivers incredible leaders, like among the best leaders in the world, but it can also make it kind of hard on kids because kids do really well, as we know from the research, when they are allowed to grow and thrive and establish their own routines and establish their own sense of agency and autonomy. And oftentimes a driver will kind of overshadow that, and they'll say, No, you just need to kind of do what I want to do. And it's not always because they don't trust the kid, it's because uh they feel most uh safe when they are in control. And so understand that if you are a driver, if you took the quiz and you came back as a driver, it's the smallest percentage of the people who take the quiz, just because it's a biased population. I don't think it's the smallest percentage among actual people out there in the world. I think if we just, you know, got a random cross-section of everybody in the fourth grade class, all their parents to take the quiz at your local public school, you'd probably see a more even distribution. But because a lot of the setbacks with drivers tend to not look like gentle parenting, it's it's the most uncommon type for people to get in my programs. And so if you come back and you get this, you might feel like, oh man, I'm kind of the worst type. Again, all of the types feel that way, but there is the sense of like a lot of the setbacks here do kind of feel like anti-gental parenting. And so we are constantly, even even the way that we talk about it, right? Talk about the three types of parenting as authoritative parenting, which is kind of the the right, it's high expectations and um high connection, authoritarian parenting, which is high expectations and low connection, that's what drivers often come out as. The the four types don't don't correlate perfectly, but they do all have a tendency. And so the the tendency for the driver is to when when they are needing growth and when they're when they're struggling, when they're not at their best, when they're not getting enough sleep, when they're not getting enough good food, when they don't have enough connection to their partner, when they don't have enough exercise, they tend to move towards that authoritarian mindset. And because that was what most of us were raised with, or many of us were raised with, it can feel like, well, that's the cycle that we're trying to break. But it's not to say that that's the worst type of parenting, right? The worst type of parenting is neglect, and that's totally apathetic parenting. That's not permissiveness, which is what we talked about last night, is the setback with uh with nurturers is that they can become permissive. The setback with guardians is that they too can become authoritarian, but just in a different way. So it's really none of these. The worst possible thing that you can be is low connection and low expectations, basically just neglecting your kid, not really caring what they do, just not being available at all, um, having no expectations, having no connection, right? Just being absent, not being around. And so I don't want you to think that just because your growing edge often looks like the things that the cycles that we're trying to break, that doesn't mean that you're somehow a worse type. Okay. Pillar number two, worth is generated or earned through performance and power. And so I want to say here, drivers can come in different flavors. Not all drivers feel like all drivers like power, but not all drivers feel like they must be acknowledged for having power. Some drivers want everybody in the room, like their kids, to acknowledge that they're the boss. Other drivers are perfectly fine being the boss and nobody knows that they're the boss as long as they're still the boss. And so good news to all of you drivers who are listening, and I don't know how many of you there are out there, but the good news is you are already the boss of your kids. They actually already know that. Even if they push back, even if they challenge you, even if they are seeking for autonomy in ways that make it seem like they don't know that you're the boss, the you are the boss and they know it. You don't have to constantly be re-establishing that and kind of alpha wolfing your way into wrestling them into submission. Uh your sense of worth does not need to be tied to those things. In other words, it's okay to feel like you do well with power, to feel like, again, safety comes through you being in some semblance of control. But when your sense of worth is tied to what you produce or what you can fix, and this can have this can have like kind of a nurturer vibe too, right? And again, all of these can kind of blend with each other, or how who you lead, or how you'll win in the end, right? This is a big one. The results in many cases are what the the driver is trying to get to. They just want to see the the finish line. You fail to realize that being just being is enough for your kid. You need to do in order to be the proof that you're actually a good parent. And that misses a fundamental principle of parenting, which is that most good parenting is just in how you live your life with your kids. It's not in how you kind of check all of these boxes or what accolades you get or what accolades your kids get because you were pushing them to like be the best that they could be. And so one of the Strengths here is that because worth is generated through performance and power, drivers can have this relentless follow-through where they can just like execute and they can just keep going and pushing forward, and they will like tolerate effort going towards something that they're not even necessarily having success at for long after other people burn out. And so this is actually it's funny, I almost never talk about him on the podcast, but I have heard a lot of things just because I'm on social media too much. I'm just on too social media too much because of whole parent. Oftentimes I'm just waiting for something to post. And so social media videos will pop up, and one of them, uh, people who's very famous on social media is this guy named Alex Ramosy, and he's a business guru. He started, I think, like flipping gyms, turning unprofitable gyms into profitable gyms. Anyway, one of the things that he says is like the the most important aspect of business success is the ability to just can you tolerate being bad at something for longer than other people can tolerate it? Can you tolerate? I think he says, can you tolerate sucking at something for longer than anybody else can suck at it? And like to me, I just hear that and I go, this guy's a driver, right? Like this guy is a core driver because he has this relentless ability to just fail and fail and fail and keep trying and keep moving forward. And that comes when you feel like your worth comes from the results that you get, no matter how long it takes to get to that end goal. Not everybody is willing to keep trying and trying and trying and failing and failing and failing, but you are. And here's the good news for that how that relates to parenting. Because I'm not just giving you personality like for life, although hopefully if you take that away and you learn something about yourself in the process, that's great. The way that this is important for parenting is that parenting is an exercise in how often you can fail and get back up and keep doing it. Right? Like parenting is at its core is just failure over and over and over. And how do you apologize? Now, it can be very hard for drivers to admit that they are wrong. It can be very hard for drivers to admit where they are vulnerable. It can be very challenging for them to admit that they don't have all the answers. They can get very defensive very quickly. But if you take that relentless follow-through and you apply it to the principles of getting really good at apologizing and getting really good at admitting when you're wrong, then actually the vulnerability that you can share can become a strength for a driver. And this is where we get to pillar three. But before we get there, I need to take a quick break because otherwise I'm gonna forget to, and then I won't have my sponsor message. Okay, we're back. Pillar three. I said we were, I was kind of coming up to a pivotal moment there. When drivers learn to apologize well, when they see that as part of the thing that they're achieving and growing into, they can become masterful parents because they have this ability to keep going where everyone else would have given up. That said, pillar number three, and it's a huge challenge, is that vulnerability is naturally interpreted by drivers as weakness rather than strength. And this is the flip where if you can get this pillar on its head over time, you can absolutely like transform your parenting. In some ways, like I think about Mother Teresa, another random person that I don't ever talk about on the podcast. A lot of people see Mother Teresa core as a nurturer. That Mother Teresa was just nurturing all of these poor orphans and disabled people in Calcutta, the the desperately poor. But I know somebody who knows, knew Mother Teresa, went and worked with her. And really, Mother Teresa was this like hardcore driver who just had an ability to look at pain and keep pushing forward. And that made her a wonderful nurturer, but she wasn't naturally nurturing. That wasn't her like desire. She was not my grandmother who like just wanted to nurture everyone all the time. She wanted to affect real change and she wanted to lead. And the way that she led was by pushing through pain often and discomfort and and pushing and pushing and pushing. And it's because she was able to leverage her vulnerability, she saw that as something to be cherished, and that is what made her into her best self. And so if you can flip vulnerability into your strength, you become a superhero as a driver. But it's not easy because vulnerability is naturally interpreted as weakness for most drivers. That looks like containing their emotions. It looks like outworking any painful or uncomfortable thing. It looks like powering through awkward things, discomfort, you know, discomfort, um, uncomfortable relationships. Just push through. And all the while just keeping your chin up and being responsible for just being tough, right? And that toughness is often identified as like I'm resilient. Really, what it means is that your nervous system constantly has its guard up, and you have this constant armor effect. And you're like an egg, which what I mean by that is like you have this hard outer shell, and the second that it cracks, like you're just spilled all over the place. Because it can't stand up to everything. And so what you have to learn to do as a driver is to take your vulnerability and see it as your greatest strength in hiding. And think about the fact that you can kind of relentlessly outwork anybody at anything, and that you can just tolerate failure and then say, I'm gonna tolerate failure in myself. I'm gonna tolerate failure in my vulnerabilities. I'm gonna look at the things that I see as my weaknesses, and I'm gonna turn those into strengths. And I am going to be so intentionally not defensive that they can do amazing things when they turn that defensiveness around. Now, they also have a tendency towards being a little bit like narcissistic because they always want to be the leader. And so that's another place where the humility, if it can be like actually cultivated in a beautiful way because they're willing to accept their vulnerabilities and become these master apologizers who who can just take in and say, and this is where, again, a guardian often the apology for a guardian often sounds like, I'm sorry that you couldn't get with the program. And seekers, we'll talk about this tomorrow, struggle to apologize at all. There's just no apologies, just pivot off and move to the next thing. Oh, okay, let's go get ice cream. And nurturers, like it can it can be its own form of narcissism, which is like, I'm sorry, I'm so like this oversaturated saccharine. I'm so sorry that I'm just the worst dad in the world and you should hate me. And it's like, no, that's just like weaponized emotional vulnerability, like not vulnerability, it's like weaponized emotional turmoil. A driver really struggles to apologize because they struggle to admit when they're wrong. But when they can, the apology can be so sincere. Like, I am really sorry that I screwed that up. And if they can do that, like, oh my gosh, it's amazing. And that's true of all of the types. But I just really like focusing on this apologizing piece because oftentimes drivers are seen as the ones who never apologize. I don't see that in the drivers that I work with. And maybe it's again, it's a biased population that the type of people who are willing to do the work that I'm offering, who also are drivers, wind up being just these amazing parents who like will put it all in line. The only people who are willing to pay me like crazy money to do one-on-one coaching, which I I shouldn't say even say that, but like I don't really offer one-on-one coaching. I I because I I do so many other things. But if you I do have a program if you're in my membership where you can pay a high premium to do one-on-one coaching if you really feel like that's necessary, and it's usually reserved for people who are like really their time is extremely valuable to them, and so they can't be on a bunch of workshops and they can't be on calls, and so because they're off making million dollars, and so they want to come and work one-on-one. All those people are drivers, and they're all master apologizers and all so good at just like owning their stuff. But again, it's maybe it's a biased population because it's the type of people who are willing to work with me. Uh, I want to move on to pillar four because um I don't want to make these episodes super, super long, and I could keep talking about all of these types until uh I just passed out from exhaustion. But pillar four is control disguised as leadership. So we already said that safety comes through this concept of being the one in charge, that your worth comes through your power and your performance, that vulnerability is your weakness, therefore you're always kind of putting up this shell or this wall except when you're unhealthy. When you're healthy, you can put that down and you can become, you know, really vulnerable in really unique ways uh and connect deeply with people. But where this kind of comes to a head in parenting is that often they will say things like drivers will say mantras like, you know, I'm their parent, not their friend. Or, you know, I really need to, you know, I'm doing this for your own good. Or, you know, they'll they'll be they tend to be more punitive just naturally because they they want to be decisive, right? And they can be these protectors of their children in the same way that guardians can be, and the other types can be, they can be protectors of their children, but often the way that they protect is through control. And I think at the best version, drivers are also often the ones who are willing to empower their kids to be more autonomous at the same time when they fail to do so, they will call it leadership, and what they really mean is that it's control. And so this you have to watch out for most when you are not in a healthy space, all the drivers out there. But when there is fear present, then leadership just turns into force. A great example is I had a person on group coaching one time talk about like when is it okay to physically like push grab your children? And I was like, ooh, you know, there's not a lot of not a lot of times when it's good to grab your kids. So what if they're running into the street? Like, yeah, I mean, if they're running in the street, you could tackle them if you have to, right? Like if they're running towards a highway or something and they're gonna get squashed like a bug, like for sure, that's when you do it. That type of sentiment of like there's gonna be an emergency where I'm gonna have to do something that I don't like to do, which is to physically restrain my kid, or grab them by the arm and drag them or haul them to the ground. Drivers often will find those places where they feel that that's necessary, where it's not necessary. Because any fear turns into force. So when we talk about are you to part of the fight, flight, freeze, and we talked about how guardians tend to like be fleers or or freezers, and nurturers tend to be f fleers or freezers often. Drivers are fighters, like back a driver into the corner and see what happens. Like I said, it's a shark. It's they're just gonna fight back because that's how they move. And so that when fear is present, it can become control. Another way that it can become control is that instead of meeting somebody where they are, a driver will often drag that person along to where the driver is. Like they don't always move to where they need to move to. And this is where, again, you can see how the the how the in in the case of the driver, in the case of all of them, the strengths, when leveraged appropriately, cover all of these weaknesses. You have this relentless follow-through and an ability to push through uncomfortable situations. Well, then why are you not the one, as the driver, going closer to the person who's having a hard time when you're the one who can tolerate more discomfort than this, you know, five-year-old child or this three-year-old child? The three-year-old child cannot tolerate discomfort at all. And they are still learning the world and they're still learning the ropes of like what it is to be a human. And so really, you should be the one who kind of offers up your own peace of mind and your own uh I'm trying to think of like the right word here, but like your own comfort for your kid. But oftentimes they don't, and it's just because they're so used to leading that they just drag people along with them. Another way that this can look is that you you wind up managing your kids' emotions instead of learning how to like co-regulate through them. So it becomes behavior management because again, it's a it's a push for control. And then within yourself, you wind up managing emotions instead of learning to tolerate disc uncomfortable emotions. You just kind of move on to the next thing often. And then last, you often, often, and this is very true, well, uh what I'll hear is that there is a kind of underlying principle that a lot of driver parents want their kids to be compliant above all else. And what kids need in those moments of dysregulation where you feel like what you're reaching for is compliance, because again, you're that's when you're not in a good place, is connection. And whenever we trade connection for compliance, we wind up doing damage, and then we have to apologize, which I've already said means that you have to admit that you're wrong, which is really hard, because it identifies a vulnerability, which often drivers see as weaknesses, and they're willing to hold that cognitive dissonance because they can push through the pain, and so it becomes very hard to apologize, and again, that's why it's so important that they do it. And so, you know, all of these things to say, I'm gonna get the fine one, but the last of the strengths before I get to this last one, because I think it ties directly to it, is that you will never find a more capable and protective leader than a driver who is willing to absorb all sorts of pain and suffering and pressure so that other people don't have to. And it's not in a toxic way, often. What we talked about yesterday with the nurture of like totally erasing themselves in order to accept this pain, that's not healthy. Drivers can accept and absorb pressure in ways that give them life and and verocity. It it's it's not like a bad thing to do. And that's why, and this is pillar five, the deepest fear is that you are irrelevant and specifically that your relevance comes from driving. This is the deepest point. The deepest point as we talked about in the last two episodes, all of us are still kind of cavemen going through the motions of trying to figure out how to exist in tribes that are no longer fending off saber-toothed tigers and huntering gathering. We are now in tribes of you know 50 to 60 people at max, or like 25, 30. We are now in these massive social networks where and in these massive urban and suburban environments, and even if we're not, we're deeply interconnected to a global, you know, world wide web. You're listening to this, and I probably am nowhere near you in the world while you're listening to it. As all of these things have changed, our ways of feeling like that we must be in the tribe have changed as well. And so the thing that we feel like we're gonna get kicked out of the tribe is if we are no longer relevant. And the way to maintain relevance is to be at the center of things, driving, leading, pushing forward, to be the first one, you know, out of the defensive stance as you charge the enemy, to be the first one to, or the the last one still hunting for food at the end of the night when you know somebody needs food and you're just gonna be the last one scrapping it. But we no longer live in that world. We no longer live in that world. You are valuable whether or not you are sick, or whether or not you are not leading this thing, whether you are experiencing a lot of vulnerability that day, whether you are not in charge, whether you're not achieving, whether you're not performing, like you still are valuable. You still have value. And your kids are not gonna hate you, they're not gonna want to abandon you because you're not those things. And so I want to encourage you, if you feel like you just want to keep going, even when you're exhausted, even when the cost is to the relationships in your life, to intimacy, you don't have to. You are worthy of love and belonging, not because you always have to lead, not because you always have to achieve, not because you always have to be the one who's right, or the one who is the best at everything. You can just be and it's enough. And so here's my conclusion for you. For most of your life, strength has felt like something you generate, something that you maintain through effort and decisiveness. You learned early that staying powerful kept you protected, that if you moved fast, stayed sharp, and didn't hesitate, that you could never be overtaken. And for a long time that worked. When you led things stabilized, when you pushed, pe problems moved. So over the cour of course, slowing down doesn't feel good to your nervous system. It makes you feel exposed. But power and presence are not the same thing. And the surprising part is this your strength doesn't disappear when you stop driving. It becomes legible. It becomes something that others can lean into instead of bracing against. Leadership isn't about being the strongest person in the room, it's about being the least shaken. The shift is subtle. The moment that you stay when emotions rise instead of just pushing through them, the moment that you tolerate the pause without feeling it, the moment that you let connection matter more than compliance, you don't stop being a driver. You simply stop leading from fear. And I'll add, you let your kids be leaders in the process. So important. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom. And like I said, in the mid-roll, you can subscribe on Substack. It's$5 a month or$50 a year. Uh I don't have that many people doing it, and yet the people who are doing it have made this possible. And so if you like this episode, if you like all of the episodes, if you want them to continue, the only way that I can keep making them is through donor support, free will donations to the podcast. Please, please, please, please, as you're thinking about the end of this year, as you're thinking about your charitable giving, I know I'm not a 501c3. You can't write it off on your taxes, but if you'd like to give me a little gift to just say thank you for what you've done this year, the best way to do that is over on Substack. Again,$5 a month,$50 a year. It's not going to break the bank. It's probably less than you spend on coffee every week. Definitely less than you spend on coffee every week. Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast and sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.

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Jon Fogel

Host