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Once more unto the breach, dear friends

Illustration by Tony Johnson.

“… and mum and dad can hardly wait for school to start again …”
— Christmas Proverb, Origin Unknown

How was it for you?

Our holidays were delightful, thanks for asking. We stayed in Barcelona, opting out of Christmas travel chaos; we bought matching candy cane socks in four different sizes and wore them together at every available opportunity. We sang José Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” an obscene number of times—I’d wager we paid for Jose’s Christmas turkey via Spotify’s pitiful streaming royalties. We ate, we drank, and we were merry.

And still … we pulled ourselves over the finish line, like John McClane snaking through an air vent covered in tinsel and pine tree droppings, watching kids walk through the school gates with smiles on their faces only eclipsed by those of the parents waving them off. Adulthood is filled with a never-ending melange of dread and delight. But if you’d told a ten-year-old me that one of the highlights of my adult year would be the first day back at school … well, I wouldn’t have believed you.

The annual odometer ticks over, and the year begins again. 2024 seems cloudier than years past: fog fills the horizon, and uncertainty looms. It’s an election year, meaning an unstable and unpredictable 12 months for folks in the US. But zoom out, and you’ll find 64 countries, representing 49% of the world’s population, going to the polls. Are we heading into a recession? Opinion is divided. But the signals aren’t good: for every ex-colleague celebrating a new position or promotion on LinkedIn, I see two letting their network know they’ve been let go and are looking for work.

A new year means setting out your stall whilst looking back, making sense of what has passed. We know resolutions don’t work—research shows 80% of them are abandoned by January 19th. But we have other ways of plotting our course. A few dads in the community swear by the Year Compass: a simple, action-oriented framework for reflection and planning. One tool I’ve used over the last few years is to choose a theme for the year (Ryan Holiday goes into a decent amount of detail on this here, and I wrote about my theme for 2022, “build,” here). I’m going to cover “presence,”my theme for 2024, in a few weeks. But, for today, I’ve got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.

The shifting definition of fatherhood underpins this newsletter, as we’re the first generation of fathers expected to be more, and do more, outside of our 9-5. The rebalancing of family income sources has been a key driver: in 1972, the husband was the primary or sole breadwinner in 85% of US marriages, a number that has dropped to 55% today. In marriages with no children, men bring home all, or the majority of, the bacon in less than half of households (48%), but this number increases steadily as kids become involved, to over two-thirds of dads (69%) in families with four or more kids. There are various ways to read this data: that the burden of raising children continues to fall on the women in our lives, as they sacrifice their careers and earning potential to take on the lion’s share of responsibility at school and at home; or that society cements the traditional role of the father in keeping the lights on at home as a family grows in size, whether they like it or not.

In increasingly unsure times, a new year brings earning anxieties to the foreground. For those folks who fall under the self-employed / independent / entrepreneur umbrella, the start of a new year—be it calendar-based or financial—means starting from scratch. If you have an annual revenue target (which, if you’re an indie, you almost certainly should), then you find yourself, once again, back to square one, with a new financial mountain to scale.

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Why am I starting the year writing about this? Well, like GOAT essayist Joan Didion once wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means; what I want and what I fear.” And because December Kevin truly overestimated what January Kevin would be capable of: emails and to-do items snoozed until January 8th, back with a vengeance; a mean hangover to the start of the year, empty beer cans that were once kicked down the road now stubbornly blocking the route ahead.

January sees a shift in the calendar for all of us. For me, it is a month filled with milestones. There are birthdays: my own, and that of The New Fatherhood, this strange thing that turned three years old this week. January 5th saw our fifth anniversary of arriving in Barcelona—half a decade since we moved to a new city where we knew no one, in a country where I didn’t speak the language, with nothing close to a steady job to speak of (after recently handing back my Google badge), and five months pregnant with our second child. Life has taken many unexpected turns in the years since, and I’ve been reflecting on the role TNF has come to play in my life. It has grown—both in subscribers and scope—more than I ever imagined. It has turned from what was once a small hobby into what internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch terms a “Weird Internet Career.”

Weird Internet Careers are the kinds of jobs that are impossible to explain to your parents. Once you start noticing them, you’ll see them everywhere […] You don’t need to be famous to have a Weird Internet Career, though it often involves building a certain amount of reputation for your thing in some corner of the internet, but most of that reputation is built by doing the thing, not by starting off as notable from something else. Some people start off with Weird Internet Careers as a springboard into more conventional jobs, some people have conventional jobs that they find unsatisfying and develop a Weird Internet Career in their spare time (that they may eventually quit their jobs for), some people keep going with both at the same time and enjoy how they feed off each other.

Last year, my weird internet career led me to launch TedOS, a digital product that helps expectant dads save hundreds of hours of research, and enables them to be more proactive partners on the run-up to becoming parents. I launched the Good Dads Club, raising money that contributed towards another eight dads finding support through the Therapy Fund. I finished my training and became a fully qualified coach, and working with my initial waves of clients has already been amongst the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done.

I’ve come to realise the unifying theme of TNF—the newsletter, the therapy fund, the community, the men’s circles, the coaching, all of it—is to enable men to better navigate transitional moments in their lives. Fatherhood is one of them, of course—becoming a parent is one of the most ground-shaking events we will ever be presented with. It’s also one of our greatest opportunities for personal growth and transformation.

But it’s not the only one. We come to these metaphorical crossroads many times during our lives (every seven years, as some believe). Many of these transitions are reactive, forced upon us by a significant life event, or the straw that literally breaks your back. But sometimes we decide to meet them head-on, choosing to intentionally walk into them with eyes open, rather than wait for them to happen to us. On a call with a dad in the community this week he shared what he thought was the glue that binds the dads here together: we may look, sound and think differently, but we’re all committed to becoming better versions of ourselves—be it through the books we read, the people we surround ourselves with, or the way we are finding fresh perspectives on topics like self-care, mindfulness, ego, health, childhood trauma, stress, vulnerability, work-life integration, purpose, fulfilment, and much more.

My coaching work isn’t exclusively for dads, but I’m finding myself working with many. Modern men are asking fundamental questions about who they are and how this is intertwined—sometimes against their will—with what they do, as they become aware of shifting attitudes coming into focus after becoming a parent for the first, second, or nth time.

A recent client referred to his coaching experience as “hands down, the best investment I’ve ever made in myself.” This year, I’m hoping to work with ten dads per quarter, and right now, I can take on another three. If 2024 is a year you’ve decided to prioritise personal and career development, and want to walk confidently into a change rather than shy away from it, then maybe it’s time to chat.

Wrapping Up

I’ve seen first-hand the transformational power of coaching—both in my own life, and with the dads I’ve worked with. I feel a growing sense of duty to ensure as many folks as possible can access it. I’m planning on doing this in two ways:

First, I’m going to pull the tools and techniques I’ve developed and discovered into the newsletter to help more folks intentionally design the life they want. I’ll be sharing more on this topic over the coming year, but here’s a starter for ten: Harvard Business Review’s series on Strategising Your Life, where you can learn how to apply the frameworks that leading executives use to run Fortune 500 companies and apply them to your own life.

Second, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. Or my time, at least. I’ve decided to dedicate 20% of my coaching capacity to working with pro bono clients who may not be able to access professional coaching but feel they might benefit from it. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, you can get in touch here.

So welcome to 2024, fellow dads. I promise this newsletter won’t become a coaching sales broadcast. But these kids gotta eat.

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