Some housekeeping before we begin. I titled last week's post Introducing Project Bennington. I meant to title it Introducing Project Brightwood. 🤦🏽♂️
Oopsie. I guess 8 active projects is when you start calling them by the wrong name. Surprisingly, it only takes 2 kids to make the same mistake. 😅
Livin' La Vida Luna y Luca
It was our 12th anniversary on Wednesday. It's a tradition to go out for Mexican with my parents, as they were our witnesses during our hush-hush court marriage.
Maybe I'll tell that story here one day.
Resilient Dad
This week's post is based on a YouTube video by Alex Hormozi.
It's called Build a Mind So Strong It Scares People.
If you have 23 minutes and want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, feel free to skip the rest of this email and watch the video.
If you want to read about how I've interpreted this video as it relates to my journey as a dad, stick around.
My kids are 5 and 3. Naturally, 2025 was full of power struggles, stand-offs, guilt-trips, consequences, and yelling. I feel terrible because I know better, and I want to be better. But in moments of frustration, I resort to old & bad habits.
Then I rationalize my behavior with, "If I did that when I was a kid, I woulda got my ass beat", as if that justifies my dramatic reaction to minor inconveniences. But it doesn't.
Furthermore, I almost always feel guilty for the way I handle things when they don't go perfectly well with the kids. But they're kids. They're loud, messy, and clumsy. And that's OK. That's normal. I need to spend much less time trying to "change" them and virtually all my time trying to change myself.
But how?
This is going to sound ridiculous, but I watched this video by Alex Hormozi titled Build a Mind So Strong It Scares People.
And even though he's a super-jacked business influencer with no kids, everything he says in the video spoke directly to me and my desire to become a better dad by being more mentally resilient when things don't go well, which is quite often.
Alex defines mental toughness as the low likelihood that a negative event will cause you to act against your goals. It's not a binary trait; rather, it's a skill you can develop over time. Understanding these four components is the first step to fortifying your mind:
- Tolerance - Your hardship threshold
- I have a high tolerance for things like whining and crying. My kids can cry directly into my ear for a long time, and it doesn't really bother me. They can ask for something 100x, and I can easily tune them out. I don't typically make concessions to appease them.
- I do, however, have an extremely low tolerance for impoliteness, ingratitude, messes, or food-related complaints. The first two are self-explanatory, but I get so bothered when my kids don't want to eat a strawberry because the tip is slightly green or they refuse to eat a piece of plain-jane chicken that touched something else on their plate.
- This is obviously baggage from my childhood of being forced to clean my plate anytime I sat down for a meal with my parents.
- Fortitude - How volatile is your reaction once your tolerance is reached?
- I typically have one of two reactions when I reach the end of my rope: shut down and walk away or snap back with righteous indignation. Let's just say it's really hard for me to walk away from a chance to right a wrong.
- I wrote about this before in my post titled, "Daddy yells a lot...", but I'll reiterate. In situations where I reach my tolerance, my go-to move is to become stern, loud, and surgical with my words. My brain short-circuits to finding a consequence, announcing it at above-average volume, and leaving no margin for misinterpretation or error. Ugh. Even typing this out is so embarrassing.
- Resilience - How long does it take you to get back to your new baseline?
- It doesn't take me long to get back to my baseline. But that's actually a huge problem. Well, it's 2 problems, to be exact.
- The first problem is I have this explosive reaction, and then I'm back to normal in a few seconds or minutes. But it's scorched Earth behind me. Neither kid wants Daddy to do bedtime, and Dia will turn on Love is Blind (or some other show she knows I hate) before I get into bed, which is basically her way of saying, "Not tonight."
- The second problem is the time it takes to return to baseline is probably directly correlated to the importance of the issue. If it only takes me a few seconds or minutes to return to baseline, how big of a deal could the offense really have been? The answer is almost always not that big at all.
- It doesn't take me long to get back to my baseline. But that's actually a huge problem. Well, it's 2 problems, to be exact.
- Adaptability - Is your new baseline above or below your last baseline?
- Unfortunately, I feel like I haven't been able to recalibrate my response to certain triggers. Meaning the things that bothered me months (or even years) ago still bother me today. You'd think I'd have a different response to the repeat stimuli, but not really.
- On the contrary, it feels like as time goes by, the list of things that potentially bother me just gets longer.
It's all so exhausting... Mostly for the people closest to me.
I'm sure there are people reading this in disbelief. Like, "Sunny? Yelling? No..."
And it's true - like 85+% of the time. Something can happen at work that costs me an arm and a leg, and I'll take it in stride. Someone can flip me the bird and cut me off in traffic, and I'd probably smile and wave.
But there's something about the pressure of not fucking up your kids that makes it really hard to be a good dad.
But how to change?
Well, there's a saying... "A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved."
That's exactly where I'm at right now. I have a good grasp on what my triggers are, but I don't have a solution for responding to them productively. Or not responding to them at all.
I wish the answer was more meditation, but it's not. I've been beating that horse for a while now. I'll continue, but it just doesn't seem to be moving the needle enough.
Maybe it's as simple as biting my tongue and taking a beat. But that feels incomplete at best and impossible at worst.
I think the answer is along the lines of leading with love. Like unconditional, pure love. Dia has that for the kids. Her mom has it for her. It's beautiful to see. But that is just such a foreign concept to me. I have all these built-in expectations...
Hm... I'm rambling at this point.
But I'm open.
I'm open to talking about this with anyone who's going through something similar. I'm especially open to speaking with anyone who "made it to the other side" of this.
Maybe I need to go back to therapy. Or maybe I need to get some sort of parental performance coaching. Is that a thing? I'll find out...
I just re-read the post from the beginning. I didn't make any changes, but I do think I'm running the risk of painting a picture worse than it actually is.
I've made myself out to be a tyrant, but I don't think my wife and kids would actually agree.
It's just that figuring this out for the benefit of my family is super important to me. I'm a firm believer that you cannot truly be wealthy unless you have a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love: three things that cannot be bought, they must be earned.
🙏🏽✌🏽