In this episode of the Craft of Fatherhood Podcast, host Ned Schaut reflects on his journey as a father, sharing insights from his experiences and conversations over the past year. He emphasizes the importance of observation in parenting, how impactful it can be to have annual family meetings for reflection on the year and connection, and the sheer power of setting goals and dreams as a family.

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Is your son coming of age as a man? He needs a rite of passage.

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Liked this episode? The Craft of Fatherhood is a weekly short reflection by Ned. For the full Fatherhood Field Notes podcast, check out the weekly releases on Tuesdays!

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Mentioned in this episode:

Rise Up Kings Genesis - a rite of passage experience for young men

This episode was brought to you by Genesis - a rite of passage for boys becoming men - by Rise Up Kings.

What is up my friends, my fellow fathers. Welcome to Friday's episode, the craft of fatherhood podcast. This is your guide, Ned shout. I believe our role as fathers has the power to change the world simply by knowing who we are and embracing the adventure on these episodes. I'll share stories from my own fatherhood journey. Now it has been a minute since I've released one of these short and sweet Friday episodes. The last couple of months has been focused on family work and finishing this office. My son and I.

and my girls have helped a lot have been working on building this 10 by 20 office space here in the corner of our property. And it is 75 % done, but this is the first week I got to work in it. And so wanting to get back to these Friday episodes. So the next few weeks, I'm just going to share some stories, some ah-hahs from the past couple of months, things that have stuck out to me. So here we go, rock and roll. ⁓

There's a lot of things that happened last year, but I'm really wanting to dig into some things that we talked about. He wrote a book. It's going to be, you know, totally eye catching invest like a billionaire. Lots of people will buy it. It's going to be great. Bob's incredible guy. He's also written another book called kingdom horizon, which is really about how the world's getting better and how God is looking for people like you and me to just lean into our homes and lean into life and, and lean into making this a great place to be.

But here's the component of the conversation. And I highly recommend going and listening to that podcast episode, but it was about what are you observing? We had talked about other people coming into the family, into the home, like as his kids are getting married and people with different viewpoints. And it was a real conviction for me that I think a lot of times I'll, I'll, so I'll give this scenario. If I observe somebody doing something and I, and I see what I don't like,

Then I take that and I don't say anything to them and I go talk to my wife or my son or somebody about it. you know, so and so this out of the other. Well, now, first off, I'm not going to that person. I'm not seeing them as a child of God. I'm not seeing them as a human. I'm not seeing the value they bring to a situation. And then I'm going somewhere else and I'm and I'm unleashing my frustration, but then I'm also tainting their view of this person, which they may or may not have any interaction with yet.

So the question is, what am I observing? And that could be, what am I observing of myself? What am I observing of my wife? What am I observing of my children or anybody? Like, what am I observing? And do I choose to see, now as a father, let's pause. Like as a father, sure, I'm there to guide, coach, call out. ⁓ But am I more...

seeing the good, seeing the growth, seeing the character and calling those things up, inviting those up to the surface, or am I just looking for the things that I don't like? And then if I'm bringing those to the light, I, am I, it's like treat somebody how you want them to act. So go back and listen to that conversation if you want, but that was a meaningful conversation about what am I observing? So I challenge you, what are you observing?

Do you see more of, and this just brings me to another conversation that somebody had given an analogy. were teaching, I was at a marriage thing and he was teaching and he said, all right, everybody look around the room, pick everything out that's green, count as many things green as possible. Okay, so then we look around the room. know, eight, nine, 15, this is how many things, okay. So then how many things were actually green? So were you trying to like, since you were trying to find green, did you actually,

find maybe half the things that weren't actually green. It's just you were trying to find green. So you found things with it. So same thing like with my wife, with my kids, if I see that my son is a great example, right? If I see my son, he has dishes in his room. So he's lazy. I see that. I don't see sometimes the winds or if I'm frustrated with my wife, I see continued compounding on the frustration and I'm even making some of it up because that's what I'm looking for. So there you go.

throw it on the TV, put some music overlay. You know, I'm not making a slideshow. I'm literally just, it's already in a timeline order. And then I'm just putting on some whatever, some station that we like, and then sit there and look at the entire year. And it's really a great time. We've been doing that since the kids were little. ⁓ if you're like, man, I have no pictures from the year that I highly encourage you start taking your phone out and just taking pictures. I take the randomest pictures all the time. If I see a moment, I just take out my phone and take a picture.

And so, I mean, we probably looked at a few hundred pictures, but if you've got 50, look at the 50 ⁓ and then reflect on the year. Then what we did, and I made an outline and then I hold it loosely because shoot, man, I have too many times where I do something. doesn't go the way I want. get frustrated. So I'll show you my outlines just in my journal for like, all right, we're to do a little family, family picture night and family, some questions. I said, Hey everybody, bring a journal. So before we started the photos,

I said, hey, I want to let you guys know mom and I are going to do a planning day soon. We're going to be talking about morning routine, night routine. We're going to be reflecting on our family meetings, what's working, what's not working. We're going come back to you and there's probably going to be some adjustments to chores and stuff like that in the next month, right? Because we all have stuff going on. Then I did a little teaching. I had been in a teaching recently. And so I wanted to teach that to my kids. So was basically like a 10 minute devotional that we went over.

And there's five kids. My daughter had her college friend over too. And just, it's like, Hey, if I can have other kids participate in that, I I'm all for it. And then this one, you know, what was the relationship that was really important to you last year? And that one was like, dad, that's a pretty tough one. ⁓ I got a couple of answers out of that. So after that, we kind of sat there and talked about it. Then I just kind of painted this picture of like, Hey guys, as we think about this coming year and look at the last year, here's some reality things like,

Brooke moved out a year ago. She's home for college. That's great. Violet's a senior. She's going to be going to college next year. Then the twins, they're going to be seniors. Then they're going to be graduating. ⁓ So I kind of went through some of these things to start to bring some awareness to like, things aren't always going to be exactly like they are. So when you look back at this season, what do you want to look back at as?

meaningful, important, and you spent your time on. So it's like you're creating some emotion and then helping them. then after that, then I had them at, there was no more dinner on the table and we journaled and we said, okay, what relationships do you want to deepen or invest in this year? Right. And, and you're wanting, or I was wanting to create some awareness of like family and connection. And it wasn't all that, but bringing up the reality helped that.

⁓ and then, and then here's what I said when sitting here in a year, what three things would you like to come true? Now here was a cool thing. I have the same journals for, just bring the journals out every year and give them to my kids. My son who was relatively quiet during the time, open up his journal. He's flipping through it he's like, Whoa, I wrote down four goals last year and all four of them came true. And it was beautiful because we were able to talk about that. Like,

Goals are 42 % more likely to happen if you write them down. So we just talked about the power of that. And that kind of lit up the room a little bit more to write some things down. So we did that. What are three things? We kind of went around, we talked about it. And then the last thing we did is one of my friends, Dane Espegard, had come out with this thing called the Dream Journal. And it's basically, there's a process of like going through and writing down a bunch of dreams you have.

Like I want to go to Paris. want to go to the Olympics one day, you know, going through all these. And so we brought those out. We've been doing those for about five years. And so we flipped through those. What dreams are still relevant? Which ones have you done? Which ones it's like, my gosh, I can't believe that was important to me. It's not important to me anymore. And then we spent some time doing that. So I encourage you to find a way that works for you to pause, to reflect and to get present and to think about the future and invite your kids into that.

The first year, let me just throw this out there. The first year that we did the dream journal, which must have been three or four, four years ago, four, yeah, four years ago, we all had written down that we wanted to go to Europe. We'd never been to Europe. And we were like, well, whoa, all of us have this thing. What if we were to make this happen? And so it was cool because we made it happen within like 90 days or something like that. And so like,

maybe there's something that all of your kids say, we really want to go camping. And so then you just make it happen. And I think there's power in finding alignment as a family and then showing that if you find alignment and then you take action on it. I mean, it can be simple. It can be very simple.

All right, my friends, come back next week. I got more stories that I want to share with you. If you find these valuable, helpful, please write a review. Please send a text to a homie. Hey, you're a great dad and I listen to these podcasts. I think you'd like it. All right, my dudes, remember who you are. You were a father and that matters. You matter. Together, let's rebel against the view that fatherhood has little impact and let's create lives engaged in mastering the craft of fatherhood.

Much love to you, my brothers. Together, we are changing the world. I look forward to hanging out with you next week.