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 Items, Social Connections, and Self Care. These are the raw materials of what we are calling your Sacred Individuality, but we aren’t there yet. We need to click down another level to see how these all connect, and how we can reevaluate and recombine them in new ways that might make your path to Dad Zone Thriving a little easier.

 You may notice that many of these items, if not most of them, actually cover more than one area. For example, you might have written “Golf” as a Core Item activity, but with sub-categories of “Golf with my friends” as a critical Social Connections, and “Golf/time spent in nature” as an important part of your Self Care. Or you might have “Meditation” has a central part of your Self Care, and also have “coffee with friends after weekly Mon night meditation session at the Zen Center” as an important Social Connection item.

 Others may be true stand-alone things. An example here might be “Daily 45 minute home yoga practice” as part of your Self Care, but that isn’t a social thing for you nor is it something you’ve been doing for 20 years. Another example might be “Weekly Craft Beer and Poker at Bobby’s house” as an important Social Connection, but it isn’t necessarily a Core Activity nor Self Care.

 Another wrinkle you may find is that some of these things often involve Mama, even if her presence isn’t necessarily critical to the activity. For example, I’ve always loved going out to eat – both trying new restaurants and frequenting old favorites. That activity had long been a favorite before meeting my wife, and a big part of our dating and pre-kid years hanging out and connecting was doing this activity together. It was a delight in our early dating when we discovered that this activity was a shared hobby, and “dining out” has been central “us time” component of relationship all along the way.

 Where in your list do you see a similar dynamic happening where there is significant overlap between your Dude Zone’s core components and those of her corresponding Maiden Zone? Make a note of those items too, we’ll circle back to them here shortly. 

Ok, now for the meat of this post. Take all of your highlighted items and neatly organize them clearly into the 3 shorter lists of Core Items, Social Connections, and Self Care. Where there is some overlap, make a point to clearly articulate a version that fits fully into each of the categories. My golf example above is a good reference for how that might look for you. Where there is often overlap with Mama, make two entries where one specifically says “with Mama” and the other doesn’t.

Now that you have the 3 categories in front of you, I want you make a column directly to the right of them all and call it “Before Pregnancy,” or just “BP".” In here, please write a very rough approximation of your current (or immediately pre-pregnancy news) Time, Money, and Energy (TME) commitments to each of those things. Very rough, please. Just put some numbers directly next to each of them, we’re only trying to get a starting point here. For example, Golf as a Core Activity could say something like 2x/week = 10hrs/week = $120/week.

The next step is to make 2 more columns and call the first one “Down Shift” and the 2nd one “Bare Minimum.” Here I want you sketch out what you think or feel would be workable versions of that first TME note you made in column 1 of BP. For example, if your BP version of golf is 2x/week = 10hrs/week = $120/week, then maybe the Down Shift version is 1x/week = 5hrs/week = $60/week and the Bare Minimum version is 1x/month = 5hrs/month = $60/month. Please do this scaling down exercise for all the items, basing your Down Shift and Bare Minimum versions off whatever you have in the corresponding BP column for each item.

Congratulations! You are now ahead of 99% of the rest of the guys out there that aren’t intentionally mapping out their path to Dad Zone Thriving! This list should be periodically revisited, and for lots of reasons. Next week’s post will get into what some of these reasons are, and how the list can be a great touch point for finding more balance between your emerging Sacred Individuality and growing Family Responsibilities.