Your kid only gets one dad

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Your kid is gonna have just so many different coaches in their lives that they only get one guy. And you're the guy if they are in a better mood because you're not gonna be there. It's gone too far. Somebody's gonna be asking a question. So so what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just let them be lazy? Am I supposed to just let them not play well? Am I supposed to not teach them how to compete and how to win and just get life?

Welcome to CoachDad

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Welcome to the coach again.

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So I heard a story. It was a sermon years ago, and the pastor was talking about wearing different hats in his journey, in his role as pastor, father, husband,

The coach hat and the dad hat

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employer, friend, negotiator. I mean, all these different things that he was doing. He he kind of had this idea that when he would walk into a different situation, he would just put a different hat on. The other day, I just started to think about the idea of the coach and the dad hat. Coach hat, dad hat. And what does that look like for us? That um I think there are a lot of times that that we favor one hat over another in our lives and in the relationships that we have, and we have a tendency in different seasons of our life, pun intended, that we are pretty heavy in one area versus another. And what um what we need to consider is this idea that your kid is gonna have just so many different coaches in their lives that are pouring into them and are helpful and are gonna be instrumental in directing their lives, but they only get one dad. They just get one dad, and you're the guy, you're the man. We cannot overlook this idea that the dad hat must be first, and we've got to recognize when we're not wearing that correctly. But does your kid brace themselves every time we go to speak to them because they're just so used to hearing the critical nature of the coach and they lose sight of the dad part of you? Um let's kind of do one of our coach-dad principle ideas and let's let's work on taking a step back and making sure that we're doing a good job of that. So uh we never want to confuse coaching our kids with the idea of involvement, right? So a lot of times we just think of uh the time that we spend coaching them and correcting them and helping them to be a better

Do not confuse coaching with connection

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player, better athlete, better competitor, uh, to do a better job of being successful, to give them all the tools that they need and the resources. Um we take that and we see that as involvement. We see that as us sharing time with our kids and as us pouring into them. And we we may not, though, see it the same way that they do. You know, I learned this truth many years ago with my wife. Her one of her five love languages, are you familiar with the story or the idea of the five love languages? One of her five love languages is quality time, right? And there are many times in my life where I get this idea that I forget the quality part of that. I just try to replace

Quality time vs. quantity time

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it with quantity. Maybe it's times in our lives when we're running 100 miles an hour doing a bunch of different things, and I just think that because we're hanging out at night before we go to bed, uh, and we're sitting next to each other while the kids are running around and we're doing all these different things, getting dinner ready and eating, and then going to bed, hanging out, talking uh before we go to sleep. And I confuse that with quality time, and it's just a quantity thing. I think I think to myself, man, we were together, we were talking, we were hanging out for like four hours, and she's thinking to herself, but none of it was quality. And so I haven't met her need. And the same thing is true with our kids that we think to ourselves, man, I I was with you the entire time at practice. Uh, the whole car ride home, I was talking to you about what you could do to be a better baseball player, a better softball player, a better basketball player, a better football player. Uh, I'm pouring into you in all these different ways. And you're thinking to yourself, this is this is involvement, this is time together. This is me pouring into you and helping to create a legacy through you. But we don't recognize that the kid doesn't see it the same way. That they see you in that role, they see the hat of a coach in front of them, and they what they're missing is the hat of a dad in front of them. You see what I'm saying? So there's a difference between a coach and a dad, and we've got to learn to take it from the kids' perspective and not grade ourselves on our own scale, on what we think is important and on how we would rate it. So we want to try to be involved with them in a way that they receive it well. So the coach-dad principle for the day is gonna be just a reminder that we are dad first and coach second. Right? We just always it in some respects you think to yourself, well, duh, that goes without saying. But at the same time, we get

CoachDad Principle: Dad first, coach second

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into modes a lot where we're we we feel like, again, we feel like we're pouring into our kids, but but what ends up coming out and the way that we say it and the way we speak it is that uh we're coaching them up. We're coaching them up. And that may be that we're we're coaching them up in in the sport, or maybe even in the way that they're doing their chores, right? Or maybe even in the way that they're doing their homework or they're talking to their mom, that instead of having a conversation with them heart to heart, we're we're speaking to them like as if they are uh a team, they're one of our teams, right? And so we've got to be really uh wary of the voice that we're using and how it is that we're saying these things. So let's think about the difference between the dad voice and the coach voice, right? Dad voice and coach voice. The coach voice is the one that's correcting, and it's the one that's calling out the thing that we see that needs to be different in them. Okay. Uh and the dad voice

Dad voice vs. coach voice

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is connecting with them, right? And they do it from different places, it's the same thing from a different place. So the coach voice, just think about it this way the coach voice says, Hey, you need to stay inside the ball. Or uh, I need you to get a wider base, or you know, I need I I need you to pick your head up as you're dribbling the ball down the court. Okay, those are all coach voice things. It takes a skill and it speaks to the skill purely. And those are all things that need to happen. And even in the personal life, those things need to happen. But then the dad voice on the other side, so that coach voice is correcting, but then the dad voice says, Hey man, I see I see how you're doing this. Let's let's talk about or let's think about uh how we want to perform what our goal is ultimately, right? If the goal is for us to be a good teammate, then we have to do that uh by seeing our teammates, and so we can't dribble with our head down. We gotta pick our head up. Okay. Now, we can't we can't always uh do that with a team, but with your kids, you can do that the vast majority of the time, right? And I'm not saying you can't ever coach your kids. Please don't take this way. You can't ever coach your kids, you can. But again, let's make sure that it's dad voice first, coach voice second. Dad voice first, coach voice second. The coach voice evaluates. So the coach voice says, uh, that was lacking, right? Um that wasn't our best effort. Uh we didn't do a good job of fielding the ground balls

The coach voice evaluates; the dad voice anchors

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today. Um the that coach voice is evaluating and looking at the way that they performed, and the dad voice is anchoring and doing a good job of taking the kid and seeing where they are and helping them to find that center, helping them to find that middle ground that they want to go forward from. Okay. Uh the coach voice is preparing the player to perform in a situation, and the dad voice is working on the person. The coach voice is working on the skill, and the dad voice is working on the person. Now you see how they have to work together. You can't just do one or the other, but we want to be sure that we're starting and ending with that dad voice, and that the coach voice comes in to play a part when we need it. I always I always think about this that that we always had a sandwich that we would give people when we talk to them, right? And you probably have heard this before in business situations or teaching or something like that, that that you have a uh a positive, negative, positive sandwich that you give somebody. The positive is a slices of bread, and the negative is the meat that's in the middle. And so that dad

The dad voice sandwich

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voice, coach voice, dad voice is another way to think of it. Have that dad voice sandwich with your kids when you're talking to them. So that the dad voice is the first and the last, and the coach voice is there in the middle doing the work forward or the skills with the kids. But it'll be some ways to get around that. And and and honestly, guys, look, I'm not telling you anything that you don't really already know, probably. Like yeah, you can search it, you can think about it for a little bit. Just take a step back and look at the situation from an outsider's perspective and look to see hey, what would the best dad I know how would they handle this? What would the best coach that I know, how would they handle this? And what what do I think that my best friend would say is going on here? Do they feel like my kid is responding to me well or is there something going on that's kind of an issue here? So that's where we want to take that, take that step back and try to examine it from an outsider's perspective a little bit and think about somebody else speaking into the situation for you. Um and then just some practical tools, some just just start asking questions first and start to think about uh trying to get their uh input. Okay. So so maybe you can come to them and you can say something like, Hey, uh, hey buddy, do you want me right now? Do you want

Ask questions before giving feedback

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me in dad mode or do you want me in coach mode? Right? You want me to put my dad hat on or the coach hat? And you can start to get their feedback about how they want your feedback right now. Do they need somebody to just hug them and go, man, hey, it'll get better tomorrow. Don't worry about it. We all strike out, we all miss the the game-winning free throw. I mean, you know, you know I just I can relate because I've been there before. I've been the guy to miss it. I've been the guy that choked, I've been the guy to mess up. And if you have been, then you know how it feels. And so put yourself in their situation. You don't need them to tell you right now, right now, you gotta get to your form, shoot through the window. They don't need that right now. They don't read that right now. They need somebody to come up to them and go, man, that hurts. We'll practice some free throws tomorrow, but today today let's just take the let's just take the rest of the afternoon off and we'll go get some ice cream or something. So you can ask them, hey, is now a good time to talk about what happened, or do you want to talk just just kind of leave it alone for a little bit and talk about it later? Do you want my input or my help? Do you want me to coach you up a little bit or do you want me to be a dad? Okay, you get their input on that. Um, or just maybe, maybe even just backing off a little bit and just saying, hey, what did you think about the game? Tell me what you thought about the game. What are you thinking about it? And let them because sometimes maybe they need to verbally process that. I know there are a lot of kids. I've got one boy that man, he needs to talk it out. He needs a person that he can go to and just and just talk it out. And I got another kid, and he's gonna bam, he's gonna hold it all inside and he's not gonna let anything out. And if you try to get that thing out of there, good gracious, it ain't gonna go well for you. Right? And so we have we have to be able to see, we have to have the wisdom to see our kid for who they are and how they're gonna respond to a situation and what we're gonna do with them, and to know how to approach that situation with them individually. So, hard questions, does your kid enjoy being around you after the game? After a bad game? I mean, maybe they enjoy being around you after a game where they did great, right?

Does your kid enjoy being around you after a bad game?

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Or maybe they don't. Maybe they don't enjoy being around you because they got four hits today, but they know that you're gonna critique the swing and miss, or the fact that they were out on their front foot on one, or maybe they uh maybe they they had a great job on the O-line and they did a great job of of run blocking, but pass blocking was terrible today. Uh yeah, I d what is it? Maybe there's a situation where they just don't want your input and your feedback right now. And as a as a guy that does private lessons for for baseball players a lot, uh, I get a lot of dads that come to me and say, Man, you know how it is. Don't listen to me anymore. I get a lot of people that do that. And and you know what, I've done that before too. But but if that's the case, then then let's figure out how to get that trust back with our kids so that they will listen to us in those situations and that they will be able to, willing and able to take that feedback that we're gonna give them. Okay, so let's figure out how to make that happen. Now somebody's gonna be asking the question. So so what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just let them be lazy? Am I supposed to just let them not play well? Am I supposed to not teach them how to compete and how to win at this game, at life?

Should dads stop coaching?

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No, that's obviously, obviously, that's not the right answer. Now, as a coach, I love to win. I love to compete. I love to play hard. As an athlete, man, it I was I was like a lot of a lot of us were, right? As athletes, we may or may not have been very competitive off the field, but when it came time to compete on the field, man, there was a dog that came out that was a different type of animal than we might have been just walking down the street, walking down the hall at school during the day. And so so I'm not saying that we shouldn't teach them to compete because we are competitors. That's what we are. We're competitors. That's part of why we're playing the sport is we want to compete. And we want to we don't want to just compete, we want to win. We want to win. And so, absolutely. Should you train them up? Absolutely. Do you want them to have discipline? Absolutely. Do you want them to have self-control? 100%. Do you want them to perform well and to learn the skill? Yes. We definitely want them to perform well, and we definitely want them to know the skill. We definitely want them to be able to be a good player on the field. That's a non-negotiable in my mind, right? But we don't ever want the game to become the primary thing. We don't ever want the game to take the place of preeminent in the life of our children. And we don't ever want them to think that their

Do not tie performance to worth

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performance is somehow tied to their worth. We don't want them to think that you are you are relating to them and loving on them because they perform well or not loving them because they don't perform well. We never want to get things inverted in this way. They have to know and understand that we love them because I love you because you're my son. I love you because you're my daughter. Period. And if we never play another minute of sports, I'm still gonna love you for the rest of your life. They have to know that. That is a non-negotiable. So the question then comes back to us having the wisdom to know which hat to wear in which situation, right? Us having the the ability to say, hey, right now I need to be dad. Right now, I need to be coach. Right now, I need to put this hat on, take that hat, and set it aside. I'm not throwing it away, I'm just not wearing it right now. So we've got to make sure that we understand the situation and the time to make sure that we've got the right time to do things. Let's have some practical guardrails, right? Guardrails are fantastic. Uh I always crack up at the sign on the highway that says, uh, warning, warning, guardrail is broken. I'm like, is that really? Are they worried

Practical guardrails

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that I was gonna plan on running into the I mean that just never made sense to me. I'm sure there's a good reason. Hey, tell me below. So let's have some practical guardrails for the relationships and and our hat swapping, as it were. Okay, so the first one is that we we need to always make sure that the kid knows, your kid knows, hey, I love watching you play. I love watching you play. I love that I have the opportunity to watch you play.

Guardrail 1: “I love watching you play”

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I love that I have the chance to see you out there competing. Right? I love that I that I get the chance to sit in the stands or in the dugout and to watch you play the sport that you're enjoying. I hope they're enjoying the sport, right? I love the chance to watch. So the number one guardrail, just let your kid know. Make sure they understand that you love watching them play. Okay, number two guardrail. Um, we we try to implement a 24-hour rule if we need it. Okay, in our athletic program, we've got a 24-hour rule. Uh and then at home, a 24-hour rule can be a great guardrail. That we are for 24 hours after that game, we're

Guardrail 2: The 24-hour rule

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just dad. Okay. For 24 hours after that game, we're not criticizing, we're not critiquing because maybe they're a little bit too fresh, or maybe we're a little bit too fresh from the pain or the struggle of it, right? Uh, for 24 hours, we're gonna take a step back and say, hey, I'm your dad right now. Uh we'll be coached tomorrow, but for right now, we're just dad. Uh number three, drive rail number three. Uh ask permission, right? Hey, do you mind if I if I coach you up on this right now? Do you mind if I talk to you about that at bat? Is it okay with you if we talk about what happened when you got the ball on the sideline over

Guardrail 3: Ask permission before coaching

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there? Is it is that okay if we had that conversation? Because maybe they know, maybe they don't want to know, maybe, maybe there's something that's going on. Uh, but we got to make sure that they're ready to receive the instruction before we just start dishing it out. Okay, we want them to be in a position to receive it. And then guardrail number four, let's make sure the car ride home is safe. We want that car ride home to be a safe space for them. We don't ever want that door to close to them feeling dread that, oh no, now I'm stuck in this vehicle

Guardrail 4: Keep the car ride home safe

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60 miles an hour on the highway, and I gotta I gotta listen to my dad in that front seat, and he's just gonna undress me based on how I perform today. We don't want that to be a situation where where uh your kid dreads the car ride home. So we're gonna make sure that we do a good job of of uh getting that car ride home as a safe space for them. Okay, so our practical guardrails. Let them know, hey, I love watching you play. Implement that 24-hour rule if you need to. Get permission from them if you need their permission to coach them versus being dad. And then let's make sure that that car ride home is safe. Okay, so now a lot of us have gone through this and and we've come to a place where we have done some damage and there's some repair that needs to happen. Okay, so let's talk about the repairing conversation with them.

How to repair the relationship

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Um, I think in all things, that the truth is gonna set us free and it'll set them free, right? That when we are coaching them up and when we're having those conversations with them, we need to make sure that they recognize that we're speaking truth to them. And that truth, as we speak that truth out, it's gonna create freedom, a space of freedom around all of us in that situation. So the first thing that we need to do as dads is we need to be truthful about the fact that maybe we've been too much, too coach heavy on one side versus dad heavy, right? So as we're walking this conversation with them, we need to come out and just let them know hey man. I think that uh I think I've been coaching you up too much and not being dad. Not being your dad, I've been your coach too much. Okay. I want to think about this. Um kind of in a in a character angle in the way that we look at this, right? Uh there was a mission, a military mission, that a colonel, like the head, head military dude, needed somebody to run a military mission for him. And when he did that, he went

Gideon: speak to identity, not just performance

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to a guy that when you looked at his biography, you would never have said, This is the man that we want. Right? And when he spoke to him, he spoke to him, he didn't look at the guy's stat line to find out if that guy was worthy of running a military mission. He didn't, he didn't coach this guy based on his stat line. He coached this guy based on his identity and what he saw in him and how he was gonna move forward, right? And so this guy, his name was Gideon, and one day Gideon is sitting there and he is threshing wheat, and he's doing it in a place that you would never be caught dead threshing wheat. It just didn't make sense. There was no reason that he would do it. And this angel came up to this guy that's hiding, threshing wheat, and he's like, Hey man, you're this amazing warrior, and I can't wait to see you, mighty man of valor. Gideon looked over his shoulder, like, who's this guy talking to? I know he's not talking to me. I'm hiding in here doing all this work right now because I'm scared that somebody's gonna come and steal this stuff from me. And the angel comes and he says, Look, mighty man of value, I mighty man of valor, I need you to lead my army, and you're gonna deliver your entire country from captivity. He didn't coach this guy up in the negative based on where the guy was, but he spoke to him from the guy that he saw down the road, right? He saw who Gideon could be, and he coached him up that way. So, as coaches, what I want us to try to do is to remember that the mission is not to look at where the kid is right now, but to see where we want them to be. And if if that angel of the Lord had come to Gideon and been like, Man, look, you're doing this threshing wheat thing all wrong, then Gideon would never have been able to lead that army out. But instead, God came to him and he worked on Gideon's heart, his identity, who he was, and he led him then, one step at a time, one phase at a time, to be the man that would lead the army. It wasn't about threshing wheat, it wasn't about what he was doing here, it was about the thing that he was gonna do down the road. And so as we look at sports, we have to always remember that sports is not the mission. The mission is not the game. The game is not the mission. The mission is bigger than the game.

The mission is bigger than the game

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That when we look at the mission, the mission is to raise kids that are gonna go out and conquer the world, that are gonna go out and do great things. The mission is not for them to get an out or strike someone out. I mean, those things are all fantastic, but anybody can strike somebody out. Anybody can make a free throw. Those are great, but it takes a man of character to do things later on, and that's what we're trying to raise. We're trying to raise men and women of character that are gonna one day be great leaders and have great families of their own. That's our mission. Our mission is bigger than baseball, bigger than sports, it's bigger than football, even in Texas. Sorry. I know, sorry. Our mission is huge. We can't ever let sports become the thing that we focus on too much. We need to focus on our kids and leading them to the place where we want them to be one day. So this week I'm just gonna challenge you, encourage you to try to focus on being a dad first, right?

This week’s challenge

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And to say something that's gonna encourage your kids, uh, to find a way to encourage them first, to lead with that. You know, I I love watching you play, I love being your dad. I'd rather hang out with you than uh, you know, you're more important to me than a thousand, a thousand games. Okay, you're a bigger deal to me than any sport could possibly be. Uh just let's just help remind ourselves of that truth and let's make sure that our kids know it as well. And then um we we need to remember that the the mission is bigger than the game. And we need to remember that the mission that it starts at home. Right? It's bigger than the game, and it starts at home.

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