DA357 | Attentive Aliveness, Ranking 1s and 10s, and Doing Internal Renovations (Aaron McHugh: Part 1)

DadAwesome

Fatherhood isn’t about choosing between quantity and quality time with your kids. For Aaron McHugh, it’s about being present in your child’s life for the long haul. Through personal stories and thoughtful reflection, Aaron shows how rest, curiosity, and allowing God to shape you can create the meaningful life experiences you want as a man and father.

Key Takeaways

• Prioritizing curiosity, wonder, and exploration in your daily life can transform your overall experience.
• Kids care more about a long follow-through than any short-term bursts of heroism.
• On a scale of 1-10, most of life’s moments fall between a 5 and a 6.2, but you can be intentional to create more 10s.
• If your life experience isn’t what you want, you have to allow God to renovate you from the inside out.

Aaron McHugh

Aaron McHugh is a writer, podcaster, adventurer, author, and global leadership coach. He hosts the fast-growing podcast “Work Life Play,” leads Reboot Your Life experiential weekends, and has been married to his wife, Leith, for over 26 years.

Key Quotes

• 20:50 - "Those investments, the kindness or the choices or Friday mornings getting pancakes together, when he was in a carseat, dropping him off in grade school. So that's really encouraging. So I would offer that as encouragement to you Dad's in the middle of it now, in the thick of it now, is it really does matter and it really does somehow, someway does find a home in them. And to me, it's kind of like the Book of Proverbs. It's in, in real time that wisdom and insight and love does indeed matter. "
• 26:59 - "Becoming a person who values connection over accomplishment. Now, I still wrestle with all these things. They're just kind of hard wired in my, the way I learn to make life work from the beginning. At the same time, I believe all of us are a work in progress and under renovation and there's a lot of hope to have around that. Summer is where I would start, is start less on the externals and start more on the internals."

Links from Today’s Conversation

• Send a Voice Message to DadAwesome
• Aaron McHugh’s Website
• Work Life Play Podcast
• Tent-Bound: A Poem About Midlife and New Horizons by Aaron McHugh
• Fire Your Boss: Discover Work You Love Without Quitting Your Job by Aaron McHugh

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