I feel neglected and lonely, and paradoxically exhausted and defeated. I work hard at my job to make sure that I am on track and positioned well for promotion opportunities coming up at the end of the year. When I’m home I try to make sure that all the usual household things are being taken care of…

At the end of the day, all of this usually ends up with me in a place of constantly simmering resentment.”

It turns out that not only are things “different” than they were during, and of course, before pregnancy, but that things are “different” today than they were yesterday, and almost every day going forward now!

“Different than yesterday” is the new “stable reality,” and the challenge of adapting to and meeting the daily challenges of continuous difference is never ending.

You’ll need a concrete strategy for deploying that gratitude in order for you to be most effective in your quest to build a new relationship together with Mama as parents and partners as you bounce forward into the future together. Hence, “Stratitude.”

Resentment is a Thief. It not only steals as much as it can from your current relationship, but more importantly, it also robs you and Mama of the opportunity to build a new and improved future relationship together that will better serve not only you two, but Baby as well.

For so many new Dads I see in my work, the truly life-changing impact of Baby’s arrival turns out to be the pure permanent process of everything constantly changing, and the inescapable nature of this dynamic. As I tell all the guys I see, there is no “bouncing back” to your pre-Dad life, only bouncing forward into the great unknown.

Fatherhood, and partnership with Mama as parents, is an awesome place for you to strive to show up as A Leader IN the relationship to the best of your ability. This is a great example of where you have some amazing opportunities each and every day to manifest and embody healthy masculinity and help move the ball forward for all of us.

Here are 3 tips for you to consider when trying to thrive in the Dad Zone by balancing your need to have integrity with yourself alongside your desires to be a credible and trustworthy partner to Mama.

Action Gaps are any and all the places where you are making either mental or verbal plans, promises, or commitments to do a specific action at a later time, but then don’t actually follow through with things. In short, there are gaps between your words/thoughts and the actions that actually follow. These Action Gaps may be large or small, serious or inconsequential, but the bigger issue is that their mere existence is inherently problematic.

The real measure of success, the one that drives people onward to new heights, is how one stacks up against their own potential. In other words, how much better can you be on your own terms, not against a pack of people who don’t really matter in the long run.

Establishing shared agreements around new Baby care will go a long way for you and Mama’s bonds of teamwork. This sense of teamwork will in turn allow her to relax deeper into trusting you, allow you to build confidence in your caretaking abilities, and allow Baby to feel comfort and care equally from you both.

The vast majority of guys have zero experience with newborn babies. And I mean zilch. Why would they unless they worked in Labor & Delivery in a hospital, right? They do, however, have lots of exposure to pictures of cute little infants all plump and either sleeping or happily awake from social media, friends, and all those Baby-related products they’ve seen recently as part of their new baby prep work. But guess what?

One of my strongest recommendations for guys who want to be great Dads and play an active and important role in Baby’s care is for them to get as much Skin-to-Skin time as possible with Baby too. Here are my top 3 reasons Skin-to-Skin is great for Dads too.

These tips I’ll share with you here not only help you better navigate the path to Dad Zone Thriving (our ultimate goal) but it also helps you better avoid getting snarled in those Dud Zones in the first place. And perhaps more importantly for many of you, it helps you recognize when you’re in them more easily, and then gets you out of them quicker too.

What are the Dud Zones? The Dud Zones are how I talk about the 2 most common ways that guys “miss” when trying to make their way up out of the Dude Zone and into the Dad Zone. And trust me, you should expect to miss early and often and will probably spend some time in each of the Dud Zones quite frequently.

Where SO MANY guys struggle is they don’t quite grasp the concept that their previous Dude Zone lives are over, and that their best chance of thriving in the Dad Zone is recognize this reality and start making adjustments NOW. They are stuck in thinking that each “event” of Baby-related activity is just a one-time occurrence, and after its over they can “return” to their regular Dude Zone life. NOPE.

Let’s take a short pause on the dynamics of the Dude Zone for a moment and click back out to the larger Welcome To Fatherhood gameplan. The catch phrase of WTF is indeed Better Connected, Better Prepared, and we’ve only covered the better prepared side of things so far in this Dude Zone to Dad Zone series. So let’s shift over to the better connected with Mama side and clarify a few things there while we have our lists out.

Last week’s post covered the Dude Zone Details. We had you make a list of all your favorite Dude Zone activities, but then asked you to highlight the ones that fell into 3 specific areas - Core Activities, Social Connection, and Self Care. These are the raw materials of what we are calling your Sacred Individuality, but we aren’t there yet.

Where do you have fun? How do you connect with your friends and family? What are your favorite solo activities? Group activities? How do you recharge alone? As we covered last week, these are your Dude Zone basics and I asked you to sketch out a comprehensive list of all these things as our starting point.

Last week we talked about the necessity of preserving your Sacred Individuality as you go along your pregnancy to parenthood journey, or as I call it in WTF, your journey from the Dude Zone to the Dad Zone. Ok, sounds great, but what exactly is this “Sacred Individuality” that you need to preserve? Great question! Let’s start at the beginning in the “Dude Zone” and see what we can find.

I’m going to list some familiar words here, see if you can spot the common theme that connects them. Father. Husband. Partner. Parent. What do all these terms have alike?

They are all relational terms that connect you to an invisible other person! You’re the Father of a child, Husband to a wife, Partner to somebody or something, and Parent of a child as well.