May 19, 2026: After a weekend that felt like one continuous birthday-party loop, I finally had a quiet moment to write about ego, control, and the professional reflex so many dads bring home: fixing before connecting. That’s also the heart of my June 17th pre-Father’s Day workshop, Become a Better Leader by Becoming a Better Dad. We’ll explore how catching our “Default Dad” patterns earlier can deepen our connection at home and strengthen how we lead everywhere else.
My son has become obsessed with making more and more complex paper airplanes.
CrunchLabs (thank you Mark Rober) has been his ultimate source of inspiration, and every day I wake up to 50 paper airplanes across our house.
So I thought I was suggesting the obvious when I said I was going to throw out all but his two favorites on Saturday morning.
He burst into tears.
I tried to react quickly, and said the first, and most rational thing, that came to mind:
“You have an entire aerospace museum on the floor. You aren’t using most of these planes. Let’s clean up a little.”
Wrong. Fucking. Comment.
He cried even harder. I was ignoring what he saw: Experiments. Prototypes. Tiny paper extensions of something alive in him.
I finally stopped explaining and hugged him. Then asked for him to share, in excruciating detail, about each of the dozen planes scattered around our couch.
Once again, fatherhood reminded me: My first instinct is often to fix the wrong problem.
The professional reflex that follows us home
Most Ambitious Dads have been trained and rewarded for being useful. Culturally and economically, we are taught from a young age to solve problems, answer questions and make decisions.
This is what we get paid for. But at home, it kills connection. My Ambitious Dads Podcast guest Dominic Hithon captured this perfectly:
“In business, I'm usually fixing something. I deal with people's problems. You can't take that same person and always try to incorporate that as a dad... it's better to just listen than always try to fix.”
That’s the tension: the identity that helps us succeed professionally can get in the way emotionally at home.
We fix because it makes us feel competent. Listening can make us feel helpless. And feeling helpless is… difficult to adjust to.
So we reach for logic, try to be efficient and focus on outcome. Except no one wants to be loved through an efficiency mindset. Kids especially live inside emotion and attachment.
Mr. Fix-It is often protecting himself
I’m sure “Mr. Fix-It” started as a compliment. It still is when I visit my parents and there’s a tech issue. But emotionally, Mr. Fix-It often isn’t helping. He’s protecting himself from vulnerability.
Ambitious Dad Joshua Gillow described this pattern in his marriage:
“As soon as she said something... I immediately would jump in and I would be like, ‘Hey, this is how you fix it.’”
Joshua eventually realized his partner didn’t always want an outcome. She wanted to be heard. And that’s true with kids, too.
Often our children aren’t asking us to end their emotion. They’re asking us to witness it. But for many of us, witnessing feels like underperforming.
This is where ego gets sneaky. “Helping” can become a way of staying in control. It lets me be the expert instead of the student. It lets me remain useful instead of present and vulnerable.
And presence, unfortunately, feels a lot less impressive than usefulness.
Listening before solving
At work, listening usually has a destination. We listen to diagnose, advise, gather facts, and make decisions.
Emotional listening has a different purpose: I am trying to understand the world as you are experiencing it before I try to change it.
This is difficult when your child’s world appears governed by deranged laws: The “banana was peeled too much” decree, or the “my brother can’t touch my toy” law or “mismatched socks now or I wale for 30 minutes” statute.
Nearly always what first runs through my brain is, “This is not a real problem.” But it is real to them.
Yet that doesn’t mean my house becomes an airport hangar forever. It means I start somewhere different.
From: How do I make this emotion stop?
To: What is this emotion trying to show me?
That is a different kind of fatherhood. And honestly, a different kind of leadership.
Fatherhood is an ego detox
When I really look inward, fatherhood feels like it challenges my identity far more than my patience.
Many of us have spent decades becoming capable, composed, productive, and in control. Then a child enters the scene and suddenly, are we any of these things?
You can be brilliant at work and still lose your mind because someone scratched their sibling in the face. You can run a company and still have no idea how to get a five-year-old into pajamas.
Dominic offered one of the simplest antidotes: “I think it's okay to sometimes just say ‘I'm learning as I'm teaching you at the same time.’”
Our children should see us as growing humans, not finished products. I tell my boys all the time that I’m working on being a better father.
“I’m working on my tone, can you help me?” And they do.
This vulnerability offers so many lessons to our children:
That we can and do ask for help even as adults
That we are always trying to grow (lifelong learning is a must)
That we mess up (a lot!) and that’s ok, too (growth mindset)
Don’t dump it. Locate it.
CEO Robert Mulhall talked about naming what was happening inside him without making his child responsible for it.
He described it as: “Not processing with him, but really owning my stuff with him... explaining to him what was going on for me internally, kind of locating my emotional state.”
How often do we really check in with our emotions and do that? (Not enough, is the answer!)
There’s a difference between saying, “Daddy is frustrated, and I’m going to take a breath so I don’t put that on you,” and saying, “You’re making me crazy.”
One models responsibility. The other makes the child carry your emotion.
This is not soft. A leader who can understand the emotions of a room is far better equipped to lead it.
What replaces fixing?
I don’t think the answer is to stop fixing. It’s to stop fixing first.
Before we give advice, we need to validate.
Before we try to correct, we should be curious.
Before we reach to control, we should connect.
Before we listen to our ego, we should lean into our relationships.
Connect first. Then guide. My children don’t need the exact same man that work rewarded. They need me to pause long enough to understand what the moment means to them.
Maybe that’s the inner work of fatherhood: becoming strong enough to listen before fixing. That will serve us as leaders at home and at work.
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