Hey, I hope your summer is going great. If you've been following along with Candy and I, you know that we're on our summer break from the show. But today is Father's Day, and I have something really neat to share with you. As a dad, I look back at our time raising our kids and man, you realize pretty quickly that there is no manual for this. I love to fix things in my shop and I've always told my kids that daddy can fix anything. But when it comes to parenting, well, not so much. As I talk to other dads, I take comfort in knowing that we're all just figuring it out as we go, trying to be a little better today than we were yesterday. We're constantly looking for those little glimpses of grace, those beautiful views in the middle of the randomness of daily life. And that is exactly why I'm so excited to introduce you to my good friend, Will. Will just started a podcast called Skills for Dads, and his whole perspective hits so close to home. He's not claiming to be a parenting expert or some kind of super dad who has it all together. He's a dad who believes that we can all help each other grow in small, consistent ways. It's about finding community in the learning process, which is something we talk about here all the time. So whether you're a dad navigating family life and responsibilities, a mom, or just someone who appreciates honest stories about family and growth, I know Will's show is going to resonate with you. So grab your morning cup of Verena Street coffee, sit back, relax, and enjoy the first episode of Skills for Dads. Happy Father's Day to all the dads and father figures out there listening. You can check our show notes to subscribe to Will's podcast. Take it away, Will. 

Are you ready to learn? Well, hi, ready to learn. I'm Dad. Welcome to Skills for Dads, a show where each week we look at one skill that can be useful in our lives as parents. My name's Will, and I'm not an expert in any of these things. That's the whole point. We all have things we can learn and ways we can help each other grow in little consistent ways that are good for us and for the people around us. Thanks for joining me. So this podcast is all about learning how to do new things. And right now, for me, that includes podcasting. So one thing I wanted to say, first of all, is that I am committed to learning how to make this a better quality podcast all the time. For this first episode, the skill that we're going to be talking about is actually the skill of learning how to start learning, or really more specifically, learning what we need to learn and what we can learn. Now, that might sound like some kind of deep philosophical Jedi mind trick, but I promise you, it's actually really straightforward. So to get to what I mean by that, I also need to talk a little bit about why this podcast exists. So I've gone through a lot of my life thinking that there were a lot of things that I just wasn't very good at. And I just figured that was, how it had to be. And, while my whole personal story isn't actually that interesting, the important point of this here and why I wanted to tell you this is that, it took life giving me some really good, sometimes hard opportunities to help me really shift my thinking on this attitude, that things weren't going the way I wanted them to in life. And I really started looking hard for what I could actually do about it. And what started to happen then was actually really interesting. Because piece by piece, at kind of just the right time, I started to discover that what I was missing in my life wasn't, you know, some kind of, inherent like mystical character trait, but rather a lot of the things that I struggled with were simply a matter of learning skills. I started to discover that there was an alternative to just being bad at certain things. well-being bad at certain things usually just means you haven't learned how to do it yet. And I started to discover that a whole lot of the things that I thought that I was doomed forever to be bad at are actually just skills that a person can learn. So, listen, my fellow dads. How many of you would sit and watch a 20-minute YouTube video? No, 3 20-minute YouTube videos to try and learn how to replace your own timing belt because one of your buddies said, oh, they're going to charge you crazy amounts at the, you know, shop and we can do that in my garage and it's not actually that hard. And you sit and you watch the YouTube video or how to refinish your deck or whatever your thing is. You can learn a skill. And the problem is there's a lot of stuff that we have to do that nobody has actually told us is just a skill. sometimes it's really obvious what we need to learn, but we still think we have to figure it out on our own. I've done that a lot as a dad, thinking I need to figure something out on my own. So for example, did you know that there's an easy way and a hard way? to teach a kid to ride a bike. There are probably a lot of hard ways to teach a kid to ride a bike, and there probably is more than one easy way. But there is a way that a lot of people recognize is an easier way than most of the others to teach a kid how to ride a bike. And I'm going to be doing an episode on that soon, and I imagine that it's pretty straightforward for most of you to understand how Teaching a kid to ride a bike is a skill. And once that skill, it can actually be super fun. Like seriously, I enjoyed teaching my daughter how to ride a bike so much. So that's a straightforward kind of skill. Other skills that we're going to be talking about, things we're going to be talking about are things that sometimes people call soft skills. And I think sometimes guys especially make the mistake of confusing soft and weak. Learning these kinds of skills will not make you weak. If you really learn them, it'll make you and your family a lot stronger. So for example, being a good listener or having hard conversations or being patient. Now, all of those things, they might seem more like character traits, but they're really built out of skills. The trick is figuring out what the specific skills actually are, what you need to learn. I mean, specific skills. So take the example of, say, having hard conversations. That's not actually a specific skill. That's a bigger project. If you said, I'm going to learn the skill of having hard conversations, that would be kind of like saying, I'm going to go on YouTube and I'm going to type in how to fix my car. I want to learn the skill of how to fix my car. Well, that really what you need to know, though, maybe when you say, well, how to fix my car, what do you actually want to fix? So you want to replace the wheel speed sensor or whatever, you can type in that and get a YouTube video and you can learn that skill. So breaking down a big problem into the actual skills, that's really what I'm talking about. So if we come back even to my example of having hard conversations, so for me, for a lot of my... my life, my problem was, and research shows that this is true for a lot of guys in particular. Often my problem would be that I didn't know how to take anything that seemed negative or like criticism without, you know, kind of freaking out and getting stuck in my head and getting overwhelmed and shutting down. And I didn't know that there's a skill. I mean, there are a lot of skills, but one skill is how to take a step back, take a breath, take a moment and reset in order to be able to move forward with a productive conversation. Now, I want to do a whole episode on that at some point in the future. And maybe that won't be as fun as the one on teaching a kid how to ride a bike or how to, you know, start a campfire. I think that might be my next episode. But I think all of these things are important. I don't just think that. I know that all of these things are important. So once you figure out what you need to learn, actually learning how to do the thing is pretty straightforward. Mel Robbins talks about how we're living in the greatest time in history for learning how to do something. Because you can order a book or you can watch a YouTube video or you can listen to a podcast, sure, or you can go on a Reddit forum. You can ask a question in a Facebook group or you can read a Wikipedia article. So back to the skill for today. How do you know what you need to learn? Well, the really great thing is that the people around you are telling you all the time, in all sorts of ways, what you can be learning. If you can just think about how to gather that information and receive it as information. Sometimes that's easier, right? If your kid starts wanting to ride a bike, well, okay, that is information, that it is time for you to learn how to teach a kid to ride a bike. If your family says that, well, these pork chops that you grilled are like really dry, okay, you could storm off in a huff and say they don't appreciate you, or you could take that as information. Like, oh, okay, how do I grill pork chops that are not dry? You can do it. There's a skill there. You know, and if you're struggling, maybe in your relationship or your marriage because you don't know how to talk about hard things. Again, the example from earlier. Well, take that as information that it's time to learn that. If your spouse or your wife or your partner or your girlfriend is sick of carrying more than her fair share of something in the household, well, pay attention. Seriously. That is information and it's important information. And again, you can take that as, well, whatever. You can shut it down. You can hope maybe that it's not such a big deal. Or you can take that as an opportunity to actually learn some things and add some skills to your list of what you want to learn. Now, here's the thing. Once you're getting that information of things that you maybe think you can learn, Write it down. Put it in a note in your phone. Send it to me. I want to know what seals we need to learn, fellow dads. Like seriously. Because I think this podcast in some ways, if it's going to be helpful for any of us, it'll be because we do it as a community. You know, fellow dads helping one another. If you have skills that you want to learn about, let me know. If you're an expert in a skill that you want other dads to learn about, let me know. Maybe we can do an episode together. And along those lines of dads helping one another, which is really my hope for this, I just want to mention a couple more things behind this podcast or about my idea behind this podcast, because this idea stands on the shoulders of giants, and those giants are the moms of the internet. Guys, the moms are out here in podcast and social media world, helping each other out all the time. That's part of where this idea for this show came from, because... there's a lot of good content out there that moms are sharing with one another to help each other out. And I partly got into that because I'm a divorced single dad. And so, you know, I can't just assume that there's going to be some magical mom in this house who's going to take care of some of these things. And I stumbled upon the fact that, you know, a lot of the other parents are helping each other out. And I know that there are spaces on the internet where dads are doing that too. on Facebook, there are some dad groups, like the Bandit Bluey group for dads. Wow, like great. You know, where dads have each other's backs too. So this podcast isn't meant to replace any of that. Rather, I think this podcast, I want it to exist because I think the more spaces for all parents, but in this case, dads are, who I am and who I'm talking to. The more places and spaces and opportunities we have to help each other out, I think the better it's going to be for all of us. Now, one other thing I think I wanted to say about that, that's related to what I said already about the, you know, moms having a lot more content, a lot more mom podcasts with a lot of these kind of skills, is that obviously a big part of the reason for that, the reason that there are a lot more moms talking publicly about the day-to-day practical stuff a lot more is because in most families, the moms carry most of that load, or at least a larger share of that load. And, you know, each household, has different ways of navigating that and figuring that out. And you dads who are listening might look at some of the skills we're going to talk about in some of our episodes here. And you might say, well, that's not actually my responsibility in my household. Well, okay, I can't make you listen to my podcast. However, if you're absolutely dead set on that way of thinking. I do hope that you're ready when life gives you an opportunity to learn something else. And I hope that opportunity comes in a gentle way. But you should also keep in mind that life can change for better or for worse. It can change fast and you can be proactive and learn ways to help it change for the better. Or You can learn ways to catch up and cope when it's already changed quickly for the worst. So let's learn some skills. You know, I happen to be a Eagle Scout and I always thought that I took be prepared pretty seriously. I know my knots and I know my wilderness skills and some of those skills will be some of these episodes, I think. Now, though, I'm really working on a different kind of set of skills. And I'm glad to have you hiking this trail of learning alongside me. So again, if you have a skill that you think that we should talk about, especially if you're an expert at a skill and you'd be willing to join me here to share it, please reach out and let me know. I am on social media at Skills for Dads. And And you can send me an e-mail at skillsfordads@gmail.com. Talk to you next time.