A Mason's Work

[00:00] So, we've been talking the past couple of days about fatherhood and leadership and anger.
[00:09] And I kind of want to bring some more stuff up here.
[00:12] It's really important, at least in my opinion.
[00:17] We started with anger as a signal, right?
[00:19] And then we looked at how that, you know, where that emerges from.
[00:22] And it's typically an expectation gap, the distance between the idea you have in your
[00:26] head of what's going to happen and what actually happens.
[00:29] And we looked at the outcome sort of focus, the way that men attach what they generally
[00:34] care about to a specific outcome or result, and then grip it so hard that it kind of dies,
[00:40] right?
[00:41] So, yesterday I said something that I want to use as the foundation for today, because I
[00:46] think it's where all three of these things connect.
[00:48] And it's the best form of control you can exert is the control of allowing.
[00:53] That line surprised me a little bit when it came out.
[00:57] Because, you know, I tend to riff on these things, but I think it's, you know, fundamentally
[01:01] true.
[01:02] And I think it points to the engine underneath all of the sort of causes for these angers
[01:08] that we get, these frustrations that build up over time.
[01:12] And it's when you start to look at that expectation gap and you pull on that thread a little bit
[01:18] towards the outcome focus, what you find underneath in that need to control is care.
[01:26] However, there is a fundamental desire that is caring.
[01:37] And that shows up as control or control like behavior, because you think, as we all likely
[01:51] do, that a father is supposed to be in control of his household.
[01:56] A worshipful master is supposed to be in control of his lodge.
[01:58] A business leader is supposed to be in control of the situation.
[02:03] So when control slips, when the vote goes wrong or the kids won't listen or all of that stuff,
[02:12] it doesn't just feel like a bad kind of like moment.
[02:15] It feels like a role failure.
[02:16] And that anger comes in to fill the gap and start kicking ass and taking names.
[02:20] But that place where you tend to lose control or have that anger flare up are the relationships
[02:33] that you sort of care about the most.
[02:37] You're not getting angry about the stupid stuff as much.
[02:45] The anger that matters anyway.
[02:47] You might get a flash of annoyance or an irritation or things like that.
[02:49] But the anger that really is a deep-seated, powerful thing are typically emergent from the places
[02:55] you really have the most care for.
[03:01] And so as we understand this, we can begin deprogramming the anger as part of that conversation.
[03:09] We can say things like, we're looking for this kind of overall directionality.
[03:19] We're looking for a deeper, more powerful relationship.
[03:21] Or we're looking for healthy and emergent adults that are coming from our children.
[03:26] And we need to, if we want them to behave in adult ways, we need to create space for them
[03:31] to do adult things while they're not yet an adult.
[03:34] We start the process of beginning to understand what we're building here is bigger than any
[03:42] one outcome.
[03:45] So in that, with that understanding in mind, you can begin to pull back your focus a little
[03:52] bit.
[03:52] You can begin to pull back and look at more into the process that we're going through.
[04:00] The process we're creating and not the outcomes.
[04:05] You're going to make mistakes.
[04:08] You will be in situations in your life that are out of control for reasons beyond your control.
[04:16] If you don't understand this, when the anger comes or flares up and you start making everyone
[04:28] in your life around you pay the cost for your inability to see where that's coming from,
[04:35] you are losing the narrative.
[04:39] You are damaging the relationships that matter the most.
[04:41] So as you work through this, as we work through this together, because this is a we thing,
[04:49] right?
[04:49] Your father did not learn parenting in the same way that you did.
[04:58] In fact, the way this typically works is the fathers that, you know, have then go on to
[05:05] have children tend to parent in a way opposite of the parenting they received.
[05:11] They perceive the parenting that they're there.
[05:14] They had gotten when they were growing up as one kind of way.
[05:18] And I'm never going to do that with my kids as the default response.
[05:22] So it creates this kind of pendulum effect.
[05:25] But, you know, there is no original sort of root cause here with this.
[05:29] There's no like, ah, well, this is the parenting defect that I'm paying for.
[05:32] That's eight generations old.
[05:33] Like there's no place that goes that matters as you build forward.
[05:38] This isn't about finding and placing blame or any of that kind of stuff.
[05:41] It's about understanding that you can be the place that moves from outcome orientation back
[05:47] to process orientation.
[05:49] And as you go, as you do that, as you gain this sort of maturity, you begin to create
[05:56] these spaces of allowing for growth and development.
[06:00] We'll come back at it tomorrow.