176: Robert Bill Jr. - Train Like a Fighter (for Home)

🎙️ Show Notes:

In this powerful episode of the Fire Forged Leader Podcast, host Steve Baumgartner is joined by Rob – The Uncommon Dad – to talk about the real battle most men face: showing up strong at work and soft at home.

If you're a husband or father struggling to transition from the high-stakes demands of work to the emotional needs of your wife and kids, this episode is your roadmap. Rob shares tactical tools for emotional regulation, mindfulness, and breathwork that help you shift out of fight-or-flight mode and into grounded leadership at home.

They dive into:

• The neuroscience behind breathwork and nervous system regulation
• Why your family doesn't need your sword—they need your heart
• How to use daily rituals to reset and reconnect
• Ways to introduce mindfulness and play to your children, especially those with high energy
• How masculinity, spirituality, and science can work together to build better fathers
• The role of physicality in male emotional expression
• Breaking generational cycles through modeling and self-awareness
• The power of male relationships and brotherhood in personal growth

Whether you're raising high-energy kids, feeling disconnected at home, or simply want to lead your family with more purpose—this episode offers the practical tools and mindset shifts to help you thrive.

🧠 Key Takeaways:

• Men need tools and training to transition from work mode to dad mode
• Breathwork can instantly shift your emotional state
• Kids don’t need lectures—they need you regulated and present
• Play, wrestling, and physical touch are vital for emotional connection
• Your nervous system influences everyone in the room—lead with calm
• True masculinity includes vulnerability, intention, and brotherhood

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

• Follow Rob on Instagram: @theuncommondad
• Learn more about Rob’s program: uncommondads.com
• Explore Order of Kings coaching: A 16-week brotherhood for men ready to lead at home and in life.

🔥 Memorable Quotes:

• “Love is not a battlefield.”
• “You get to create any version of fatherhood that you want.”
• “We need the physicality. We have to have the physical component.”
• “The lone wolf dies alone in the wild.”
• “If you’re not training for fatherhood—you’re not ready for the fight.”

Transcript

[00:00:00] Robert, welcome on to the show, man. As we were talking about right before the cast started, I'm really impressed with the videos I see online with your children, with your wife, the love that you have with you and your wife, and the sparkle that I see in her eyes. Just the connection that you have with your children, and it's something that men in general, they want, they strive for.

Somehow they just can't seem to capture going out there and grinding and coming home and being that figure that they need to be for their kids and their, for their wife. So I really appreciate the content that you're putting out, and that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you today.

So just tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, man. First I really appreciate that because it's hard to really recognize where you're at and how things are going for you. Without having it reflected back by somebody else. And I don't remember who I was talking to a few months ago, but [00:01:00] maybe it was, uh, I can't remember his name.

Blackwell. Blackwell. What's your first name, brother? I can't, it's not coming to me now. But he was talking about how he was out taking his kid home from I think football practice or something, and his coach stopped him up to dad and was like, Hey man, I just want you to know. Your son's got a really good head on his shoulders, like he works hard.

He always does what's right. He's always paying attention. He's always tuned in, and we don't recognize the impact that we have on other people when we're in it. Until somebody reflects it back to us. So I really, I really appreciate that. And that's what we all want as men, right? Not just to have that level of connection, but to really know that they're happy.

And I have a cafe that I work at most days because this is my garage. Full disclosure, I work in my garage. I have a propane heater. That's it. But I go to the cafe because it is challenging for me to put up a barrier between work and home. And that's what we're gonna talk about here based on the question.

And I talk to the baristas [00:02:00] in there all the time. And one of the girls was like, I really I really value what you do because none of my friends get it. But I just, I really wanna be a mom and my friends laugh at me about that. And one day I came in with the family and the next day she was like, I was gonna cry when you guys were here 'cause your wife just looks so happy.

She looks like she's just so happy with what she's doing. It's those things that really validate okay, yes, 'cause this is what I want. All that I want for her is just to do what she wants to do. She wants to be mama. She doesn't wanna have to worry about working. She wants to just be able to be here and be with the kids and read a book.

I. Absolutely. And that's what I want. And that's what we want. And as men, like you alluded to, so many of us struggle with Yeah, what? How do I transition from who I need to be at work and outside the home to who I need to be inside of the home? And I think that our culture, I. And I really try to operate with Hanlon's Razor, not to attribute to malice that which can be attributed to, we'll just call it stupidity and [00:03:00] negligence.

But I believe that our culture has really robbed us of a few things as men and initiatory processes. One is going from boyhood. I. It's a manhood learning, but not learning. 'cause learning is, yeah, I can know stuff, but it doesn't mean that I do it. But really embodying what it means to be a man, which is to take on responsibility and selfless service.

And then the second one, and Max Trombley iss writing a book about this right now, is the initiation into husband hood and fatherhood, which is what the bachelor party used to be. It's not an initiation anymore, but that used to bring us into the responsibility of family and the spheres of home.

Versus battlefield or home versus hunt. And when you get home from a hunt or the battlefield, you're gonna take your armor off and you're gonna put your sword away. But most of us as men have no idea how to do that. We don't even know that we need to, nor do we have the tools to do that. And I think that's one of the biggest struggles for most guys, and that's something that I really, I'm so focused on in my life.

Is doing that because they don't need my sword. That's how we accidentally [00:04:00] lash out at the ones that we love and we accidentally hurt them physically, mentally, emotionally, and our armor, which is how we struggle to connect to them. So when we're armored, they can't feel what's going on with you. And no matter how hard you want to and know I'm supposed to get down on my kids' level, you just can't feel what's going on.

I think that's an interesting analogy too with this armor, right? Back in the day when you actually had to pull off armor. Hang up your sword. There was a spot to do it. There was a physical transition, if you will, in between taking that off and changing who you were. Now it's all metaphorical, it's all on the inside.

And you talked about not having the tools to do that. So can you go into the tools a little bit more and you know how you see that? Yeah. Yeah, you saying that the last Samurai is one of the movies that got me into this so much, and when Ren is prisoner and he's living with the wife of the Samurai whom he slayed, the armor has its own room and it's up not just on display, but in [00:05:00] this, it's up, in this way that has this reverence to it and it has its own space.

And I think that's one of the things that we're missing is we don't men, we need our own space. We need our own space, and. When we create space, whether it's physically or mentally and emotionally, it creates a reverence and importance to the things that we do, but also helps us de delineate between work and home.

And okay, how do we do this? A lot of homes have mudrooms, ours doesn't, so it's a disaster. But when you walk in the house, what do you do if you're muddy? You take your shoes off, right? If you're like, my kids, we're still training that. If you're like me I still wear my shoes in the house sometimes working on it getting better, but we take our stuff off at the door.

If it's the winter, you hang it up and then you go into the house. When we walk in, as I. Men from work, we have to take work off at the door, but how do we actually do that? How do we do that? Most people have no idea. If you look into ancient traditions, like yoga is a 10,000, 15,000 year old tradition depending on who's a counselor you're talking about.

One of their [00:06:00] practices is ssha purification, and what they talk about is when you get home, you clean yourself, you go get in the shower, and you take all of your work clothes off and you put on home clothes. Put on different things, but what can we do when we get home? Okay yes. I change my clothing.

Like I love my clothes. My clothes are so comfy. I love these, but I get into home clothes when I get home. That's one thing we can do. The other thing that we can do is we have to shift the nervous system. 'cause when we're working work is the battlefield. Your family doesn't need your sword and your armor.

Love is not a battlefield. Even though there's a song about it, it's not. So what can we do? What's one of the most potent ways we can shift the nervous system is through the breath. Most people have no idea, but there's a reason why every spiritual tradition begins with the breath, right? It's sent in the word spirit, inspired to breathe into, expire, to breathe out.

It's in the language. Re respire to recycle life. Vital life force. When we inhale people, most people have no idea. You stimulate. The alertness [00:07:00] response or the fight or flight response, sympathetic nervous system. When you exhale, you do the opposite. You stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. That's rest, recovery, connection.

So if we just start to balance the breath, even inhales and exhales, you can start with four seconds. Scientific literature says 5.7 seconds. That's too much for me. Six seconds is great. You just do a six second breath. You could do it one time, 10 times three, five minutes before you get outta the car and walk in.

The guys that I work with, we practice this as soon as we get in the car, and then we continue it as we drive home. It's called a power break or a shift. You shift gears before you walk in. What you do is you get the nervous system to level. This is called what the yoga is combined called centeredness.

Balance, what everybody's trying to achieve. How do I get more balance in my life or in scientific terms? It's called coherence. Balance point in the nervous system from which we can go anywhere. What we're doing there is by doing that we access this state called coherence. And then you're not in fight or flight, you're less reactive, [00:08:00] right?

When you're stressed out, you actually lose 80% of the blood flow to the thinking areas of your brain. You're dumb. You're a dumb brute. So by doing this, we get that blood flow back into the prefrontal cortex. Now we are response able, we're able to respond to whatever comes our way. The armor's off and the swords off.

The other thing that I recommend that guys do, that we drill every single day inside the program, 'cause this is training, this isn't just knowledge. You don't embody it until you've practiced. It becomes who you are. It's installed into the nervous system is we do what I call the lighthouse technique. So while we're in that breath and we're breathing, and you guys can do it now, breathing in for four or five, six seconds in and out, I want you to bring yourself back to your absolute most cherished memory with your wife for me.

It's the moment that I proposed to her while we were in a tree. Yes, a little dangerous. And for a while she didn't say yes or no. She just kept saying, you have a ring. And I had to help her get out of the tree before she could say yes. You focus on your memory and you focus on your most cherished memory [00:09:00] with each of your children.

Often I think of the first time I held each of them and the difference between each moment. So now what we're doing is, yeah, we're breathing. We got the sword sheath, but now what we're doing is you can feel that emotion. I know that you can, when you're thinking about it now, the armor's coming off. Now we're feeling positive emotion and you can only feel into your wife and your kids as far as you can feel into yourself.

So breath, we've got the vision. We're creating actual feeling in the body, which shifts the hormones that are being secreted. This is a biohack, but it's not a biohack. This is actually a technology that we have not been given, but I'm giving it to you now, and now you're gonna go walk into your house, and here's the next cool thing, is that your nervous system, it emits an electromagnetic field, two feet around you.

This is why you can walk into a room with somebody and you can look at a guy and be like, I'm not gonna talk to him. And you look at somebody else and be like, man, I really like this guy. I've never met him before, but we are best friends and you can go have the greatest day ever with somebody. It's because your nervous system is always [00:10:00] communicating with everyone else's nervous systems around you without words, and without even without nonverbal communication.

Which is what most of our communication is. But before that, it's the nervous system. You know what's happening in someone else's body. Guys come to me, they're like, I wanna be the safe harbor for my kids, for my wife. I want my presence just to be calming, and I want them to know that they can come to me.

Yeah, we can do this through our actions, but more than anything else, if your nervous system isn't screaming, I'm calm. I'm safe. I love you. They're not gonna get that. So what we do is we do the breath to sheath, the sword. We activate that lighthouse, okay? We're sending the beacon out, like I'm the safe space.

I can feel it in my body. And then when you walk in, because of how your nervous system works, they pick it up as well. Nice. And then you walk in and you're not the, you're not the samurai warrior anymore. You're the gardener. And now you get to walk into that garden and nurture the hell out of that. And shine that light in your heart that we activated onto them.

'cause what happens when you shine light onto a garden or a flower? [00:11:00] They bloom, they grow. That's what we want. That's what we want as men, as husbands, fathers. And that is the nutshell of the work. That was beautiful, man. So in my practice, we start off with leadership itself, which is mind, body, soul.

They gotta come together to, to get all that. And since you gave this to us today, I'm gonna start incorporating that in. So thank you for that. A little clarification on the breathing. When you're talking about breathing, are you talking about a full deep breath for four seconds and then holding it or can you go into specifics of that a little bit?

Yeah, so we can do breath holds. I often use breath holds with my guys there. There's something else that happens with breath holds you, you train your. Carbon dioxide tolerance. Most of the reason why we have an anxiety is 'cause we have low carbon dioxide tolerance. When that happens, your body thinks you're drowning, so of course you're gonna feel anxious.

So when we train breath holds, that's one of the things that we're doing. But in this technique in particular is called circular breathing. There's no hold at the top or the bottom. It's [00:12:00] just a smooth. Cyclical rhythm. So breathing through the nose, I would put your hands on your belly so we can puff up the belly as we inhale four, five or six seconds, and then directly into your exhale, which you can exhale through the nose or the mouth.

That's up to you. One of the reasons is because in the studies that have been done, circular breathing has been shown to be the most effective at inducing this coherence state, even compared to box breathing, which is a popular Navy seal technique. Mark, what's, I don't remember his name. Rell maybe. Maybe that went out in my head.

That's okay. That's alright. But even compared to box ble breathing, triangle breathing and throwing in breath holds anywhere. The circular, breathing this six seconds in, six seconds out, no pauses, has the greatest effect in clinical settings. So that's the reason why we use that as our foundational technique.

And then everything else is layered in based on well. Okay. Yeah, that's the science, but how does it feel for you? That's where we start to turn it into an art for each individual. Right. [00:13:00] So it's interesting because I hear you going, you know, you talk about yoga, which you know, a lot of people tie you to spirituality, but you also talk about this science, and I heard you talk about this field that you have around you, and I would imagine that that's baked in both just by what I'm hearing you talk about is that mm-hmm.

Correct. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I have always been a very rooted science, well, not, I guess we can't say have always now, but coming outta college, I spent 10 years in the fitness industry, so everything that I did, I had to have clinical research to back it up. That's who I was, that's how I operated. And then I came into my own, uh, initiatory experience.

When you don't go willingly, the pain teacher shows up at your door. And so for me, that was anxiety, panic, and then having to face all of my coping behaviors that were wrecking my life. And so then I began to immerse myself in meditation and breath work. I called therapy and spent time with the temple of Crea yoga, going through meditation, [00:14:00] teacher training for a year and a half, and that's when I started to, hmm.

Let go of the science quote unquote. You can, if you guys aren't watching I'm doing the quote thing with my fingers. I. And immerse myself into the five, 10, 15,000 year old tradition, which is yoga, right? Which really, if you look at Chinese medicine, if you look at yoga, these are 15,000 year old practices that have more writings on them than most of our medical research.

So yeah, they're highly scientific, right? Thousands of people over thousands of years have done these things and all said the same thing. So it's a combination of both. And yes, there's science that backs it up. But more than anything else, what I tell people is don't believe a word that I tell you. Do it right as taught first, give it two weeks and then judge it for yourself.

I think it's important to bring up that it can be both, though. Right. If you wanna take it down a spiritual road, it's definitely there. A tradition road. It's definitely there, but it's also science-based as well. Whether you wanna go get into yoga and those practices or whether you wanna go down the [00:15:00] science road, it's still work.

Yeah. And what I've found is that, okay, so we have religious texts, and then we have scientific texts. You might say the scientific texts are like religious texts too. And uh, okay, we're gonna do those practices. But if you do them. You let go of what you're told about them and you just immerse yourself in them.

What I've experienced and the guys that I teach as well, is we start to have more spiritual experiences and what is spirituality, but connection beyond the self to other and to all things. What is a spiritual man, but someone who can take responsibility for the impact that his actions have in the world around him and know the immense impact that he can have in the world around him.

When you immerse yourself in any of these practices, that's the kind of thing that starts to happen. I like that. I like that. You're exactly right. That's no matter whether you're Christian, Buddhist, whatever you're. Faith-based or spirituality is, it's all about that connection. It's about connection with the [00:16:00] creation.

Right? I like that. I'd never thought about spirituality being like that before, so thank you for that. Going into it a little bit deeper, there's, we all have this. Yeah. I get what he's saying, but. It's not gonna work for me. For example, my nature is picked up along this conversation and my kids are wired like me.

Every male in our lineage is. High A DHD spectrum, right? And neurodivergent or whatever you wanna put on that, there's a lot of frustrations that come with raising children with that high energy all day long, every day. So I. I would imagine that some of your clientele has, or maybe even yourself, Rob, have children like that.

Is there, do these techniques work out of the box like that, or are there different strategies that you would mention for people like that? Yeah, I'd say that they work out of the box. You do have to do them consistently, and the more that you do them, the more powerful that they are. It's just like going to the gym.

Okay, I'm gonna do one [00:17:00] workout. I can't expect to hit a five, 500 pound deadlift after my first time deadlifting. Right. But if I stick at it for weeks, months, years, I'm gonna hit that 500 pound deadlift if I want to be. I. This pillar of patience and presence and empathy and connection and the safe harbor for my kids, even though my son is a boy and man, he is fucking nuts.

Like he just can't sit still. We're at the dinner table, he's up walking around. He needs to stand on the back of the chair now, and now he's gonna get a stool and my daughter can, like she just sit at the table for an hour. Great. If I can do these practices consistently, I can learn to operate with that.

I can learn to ride with that. And be more patient with that and responds to the situation rather than overreacting and trying to control it. And so if we wanna make that kind of change, yeah we can. We can do a daily transition from work to home, like we talked about at the beginning. But really if we really wanna ingrain in deeper change and we wanna shift the [00:18:00] nervous system and yeah, I've got masculine consciousness too, so it's really easy for me to get all over the place.

Just like my son I'm like, man, I see you. I see myself in you. I love you so much. And my wife is often like, I have no idea what to do about this. And I'm like, I know you don't, you're not male. You will never be able to understand him. He'll never be able to understand why. He just resists everything that you say to him.

He's just, he's got this high trait disagree ability 'cause we're masculine and he is a little crazy. Absolutely. But back to the point here. Does this work if I have masculine consciousness or higher A DHD, what we might call it now, my kids have that too. Yeah. How do, how is this gonna work?

Well, we have to treat it just like we're going into a, a training session. We're going into the gym, the inner gym. I call it the dojo. We have to set aside ritual space every single day. Just like you might go and work on your deadlifts. A few times a week, and this is why when we got on and you asked me how my day was, I was like, it was great.

I got up at [00:19:00] 4 45, I got my run done, came back, got in the cold plunge, just a breath work meditation. Sat for a minute. Little bit of work, very, very all over the place already, right? You can see the masculine consciousness. And then I made breakfast for the kids and now I'm here. We have to create ritual space.

So who is it that you want to become? If I want to be more patient, if I want to be more of a rock that can withstand the waves and the crazy. Of life. I have to sit in this ritual space and train whatever the quality is that I want. So if I want that we should probably sit and do this coherence, breath work that we talked about for five or 10 or 15 or 20 minutes every single day.

Not only is it gonna help you for the next couple of minutes and or hours, and then when you start to get worked up. Take one minute, sit down, and then my son sees me do this. Like when he's really pushing me and I'm like, ah, okay, I need a minute, buddy. I'm gonna sit down and dad's going into a cone of quiet.

I set a timer, I close my eyes and I'm just like, I do my breath. I sit in meditation, whatever, [00:20:00] and then I get back up and I come back into it. If we do this every day, 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, and we take one shift or two shifts throughout the day, maybe that's at lunch or that's before you walk into the house, we start to become more calm.

We start to become more patient, and then we don't have to remember in the moment like, I should probably remember this technique, or I should remember to take a breath in the moment. You just start to do it. Mike Tyson has that quote. Everybody's gotta plan until they get punched in the mouth. Boom. This is husband hood, this is fatherhood.

This is what it is to be a provider. Something's gonna hit you in the mouth. We know it's coming. But what happens when that happens is you drop to the level of your training. So if we're not training these things, they're not going to happen. And instead of leading yourself and leading your family, because your kids learn emotional regulation from you and ability to regulate emotions or inability to regulate emotions, whether they make or break your marriage, if we train it, you're gonna be able to drop into that breath and that I.

Intentional [00:21:00] purposeful centeredness in that moment with your child or your wife, and you'll be able to make, I'm not gonna say the right decision, but a slightly better decision than what you would have made. And that's where when guys come to me and they're like, yeah, I wish I could remember to take a breath in the moment.

I tell 'em, don't. That's the worst advice. Drill it. You're training for it, and then when things start to happen, you're gonna start doing it naturally. You're gonna start dropping into your breath when, when your sun is crazy and melting down and all over the place. I. And then you're gonna make a slightly better decision.

I like that, man. This is good stuff. Rob. I'm really curious at this point, about your wife and children and these techniques. Number one, does your wife do the same thing? And then number two, are you training your kids in these techniques? Well, my wife will tell you that she. I had to pull my ears to get me to do yoga back at the beginning.

And all of this was her idea, and I'll say it's [00:22:00] true, it's true. So she began all of this before I did. And so she also is very grounded and very well versed in this stuff. And we implement it together. But mom life especially stay at home, mom life is so different than than dad life, especially entrepreneurial dad life.

And so the structure is different. So her practices look different than mine. And women's practices need to look different than a man's practice. With the kids, though, I invite them into all of this if they're up early, training them to stay back in their room now. But when my son does wake up early and my daughter's asleep, I'll bring him out into my ritual space with me.

Because I can't have him waking up. My wife can't have him waking up Anybody else? So, okay bud, we're gonna come in here. You can only come in if you're gonna either nap on the floor or you're gonna be in practice with me. Right. What do you wanna do? Okay. And he is gonna wander around and do other stuff.

Okay? Here's what we're doing now. We're gonna do breath work. You ready? You wanna sit in my lap? Okay. Here we go. Okay, now we're gonna meditate. Here's what we're gonna do. Here we go. So they get to come into ritual space with me, and on the weekends when I practice, I do it [00:23:00] in public, in the public space for us.

So out on the deck or in the house so that they can see me doing it because they need to see it. That's the only way that they're gonna learn it. I can tell them a hundred times, but they don't listen to anything. They do what we do. And when I have to discipline, which they're crazy. My son's crazy. I'm gonna see what happens with my daughter.

But she seems to be the actual rebel of the family. This is where the practices really come out. Because we talked about taking a breath in the moment, but when they're melting down, they can't hear anything. And nor can you, when you're stressed out, there's nothing that anybody can say to you that's actually gonna be received.

It's usually just turned around and yell. Like, oh yeah, well, that's a reaction. So just the other day, my son was, I don't even remember why. I don't even remember why he had to go to his room. But the room is not a timeout, it's a breath break. It's a meditation space. Mm. So when he was younger, he's almost five now.

We do this with my daughter because she's two. So when she goes in there, I gotta go in with her and model it. But when we go [00:24:00] in there, I would just, okay, you're gonna come in here. Yeah. You know what? You're creating problems for the rest of society, so you just can't be in society right now. So we have to remove you for a little bit.

We're gonna go into your room. This is your safe space, and you, whatever the hell you want in here, I'm gonna sit here and breathe until you join me. So they see me doing. And what was fun was, okay, once my son got it, then I could bring him in there. I could walk out and be like, Hey, I'm gonna be out in the hallway when you're feeling better.

We can talk about what just happened. And then I'd come in and he'd be sitting meditating or he'd have his little fox eye mask on for meditation. He would just be sitting there with it on and I'm like, yeah, well, he must be getting it. This isn't a punishment. This is a space for you to come and just like, get regulated and feel better because if I leave you out there, it's just gonna cause more problems.

And it's because he sees me doing it. And then when I'm under stress in the kitchen, I'll say things like, ah, dad's feeling a lot of irritation in his body right now. And I'll tap, why do I tap? Because there are points on the [00:25:00] body that you can tap on that shut down the amygdala, your emergency center in the brain so you can start to talk about stuff while downregulating the emotion of it.

And so what do I do with him when he's in high emotions? We can't talk and he is like really struggling because we can't let them to become, we can't allow them to become possessed by the emotion anger, especially 'cause it changes the structure of the brain. So like when he's really going for it, I gotta help him regulate.

So we can do a high intensity, well we, we could start with a low intensity regulation, which is like, let me just hug you. Okay, let's hug, let's hug it out. Works great for my daughter. My son hates it. He needs high intensity self-regulation, so he needs to wrestle. Most of the time, like he needs me to bounce him around and shake him.

And he need, I need, he needs me to sit down with him and be like, okay buddy, hit me as hard as you can. And he'll come and like run at me and I'll grab him and will like roll on the floor a little bit and he'll start to laugh. And that laugh is so important 'cause that's where [00:26:00] tension is being released.

Physical, mental, emotional tensions being released and we have to do this. If we want to be able to repair and get right and so this, this is what I do. Okay? So I'm so stressed about this thing. I have to sit with myself and my ritual and I gotta write this down. Yeah. This is what's stressing me out.

Let's go through and let's tap through it. Yeah, this, this really fricking hard, but with him, he can't do that right now. So what do I do? I go in there, let's help you regulate. We're gonna do a high intensity technique 'cause I know you're a boy and 'cause of the low intensity snuggling. Hugging, you didn't help.

You're still wailing. So I want you to hit me as hard as you can, and he will tackle me and I'll take him down. We'll roll around a little bit and I'll punch him in the belly a couple times and he starts to laugh. Okay, now we've dispelled the negative emotion, we have the tension release, and we can continue doing that until we're just having fun, and then we can talk about what's actually happening.

When he becomes older, he now has the tools to, to know like, okay, I am feeling stressed. I'm gonna go to this quiet space. I'm gonna take some [00:27:00] breaths, or I'm gonna meditate, or I've seen dad do this thing. Or I know that dad, when we, when I was really stressed out and he, he asked me what I wanted to do, he was like, do you wanna be a monkey?

Do you wanna be a lion right now? And we could go do that. Ah, we could get the body involved and move and actually discharge stress and tension that way. He's gonna have those tools when they're really little. They're not gonna really. Pick up on the things that you and I have talked about so far. Like, okay, let's do breath work.

Let's do meditation, right? Let's journal it out. Let's do some emotional freedom, technique tapping. They're not gonna get that. We gotta make it play. So, okay, we're gonna do a low intensity technique. I'm gonna hug you or we're gonna do high intensity. Let's wrestle. Whatever's gonna work. Let's do some lion's breaths.

Okay. We're gonna take a big breath and stick our tongues out. I got them each. These canuso, where is it? These canuso necklaces. They look like a little, they look like a cigarette. They've got silicone ones and I, they each have 'em now. So what we do is who can breathe out the longest? Okay, here we go. And we breathe out through the little tube here.

Oh, all of a [00:28:00] sudden he's doing breath work and it's a game and it's fun, right? And sometimes my son will just go do this and start breathing through it. Cool. Awesome. He's old enough where he is starting to understand balloons. Well, that's breath work. Okay man, let's go blow up some blue. Who could blow up the biggest balloon right now?

So they're starting to pick up these tools and these skills without me having to teach it to them. Like I would somebody who's coming to my breathwork training, and as they get older, they're just gonna have 'em. So absolutely. My wife is grounded in this and I absolutely recommend that all men who go through this work, if you guys can make it work, have your woman connect with an actual women's guide as well.

Because when we do this work alongside each other, we grow exponentially more. Absolutely. And with your kids, you introduce it to them at their level, and you make sure that they see you doing it too. They have to see you doing, otherwise they're not gonna pick it up. Going through all that, especially with your son, really helped me understand my 6-year-old.

So he gets to a point, especially by the time that I get home from work, him and his mom, your, [00:29:00] your wife, same sort of deal. Doesn't doesn't understand him. To beat the band. Right. But by the time that he gets home, there's some days that we come to head, we're not doing these kind of practices together and I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna take some of this and start working with him on, you talk about this field, you also talk about the high intensity and.

It's making sense. I'll come home, we'll come to head. But then what he does is that, you can tell that he feels bad. I've never understood this point, but he'll just come over and I'll be standing there by the dinner table or whatever, talking to my wife. And he'll just ram into me, and I've noticed that if I reach down and I just heavy massages scalp in that moment, that it brings peace. And it just, it's bringing it all together. So I wanna appreciate you right now for that. That's, that's, yeah, you, IT men, males, we need physicality in order to regulate, which just like when I was in the fitness industry and I was a nutrition coach, I had to say, I'm not a [00:30:00] nutritionist, but here's what I would eat.

I have to say that I haven't seen therapy really work for guy, A guy that's come through my work yet. Because most of it is missing the physical component. Men, we have to have the physical component. Why is it that we feel so much more connected to our wives when we have sex consistently? Well, that's it.

We need the physicality, right? Our boys. Especially and I think girls are a little bit different. My, my daughter loves when I wrestle with her, but our boys, if they, if in order to actually release stress, they have to have the physical component. My son's always like, can we wrestle? Can we wrestle, can we wrestle?

And I'm like, I'm finishing dinner right now. We're gonna wrestle in a minute. And when we finally wrestle, he just like, he can let go. Everything's good. And even though we have my eight week old son here. And when I get home, I, we finish dinner. I'm like, love, go hit the showers. Go clock out, you're done.

And I got the kids now, even if tuck's not happy and he's crying, I'm like, I'm gonna put you down. You're eight weeks old, you're not gonna remember anything. [00:31:00] All right guys, we got three minutes. What song do we you wanna listen to? Real American. We're gonna be Hulk Hogan today. All right. It's on it's wrestle time.

And so my son and my daughter, they would, I'm just like, everything you got guys, let's go. They just run at me for three minutes and I was just like. Throw him at the couch and once that's done, everything's good. But if I push that off or I'm like, no, I got the baby right now, he really needs me. Then it's meltdowns and tears and, and power struggles until bedtime, beyond bedtime.

And then it's harder to get him down. And my wife consistently is like, why does he need to punch me in the leg when he walks by me? And I'm like, it's nothing. It's just us. It's just us. Why do I need to slap you in the ass when I walk by you? Because I like your butt, but also like, I need to touch you.

You can't understand it because you're not male. But if you can start to get into your head that like, this is just how we're built. We're so physical, we have to touch things. We learn about the world through physical exploration and your son needs to like. Come ram into you when you get home [00:32:00] to regulate and to connect to you.

And if we can start to absorb that and be like, all right, dude, I'm gonna ram into you too. I love you. It makes everything so much easier. And we start to understand each other and build bigger connection. And then he doesn't have to start to repress those parts of himself. He doesn't have to shut down.

What it is to be a boy, right? What it is to be masculine. Yes, he's going to have to learn how to control it, but it's a hell of a lot easier to learn how to control it than learning how to regain access to it once you've shut it down, right? How do I be assertive? How do I be strong in the world?

It's a hell of a lot harder to try and refine that in yourself than it is to just learn how to control it and to learn like, okay, this is who I am. How do I make sure that this is harmonious with everyone else too? That's awesome. That's awesome. I got a whole new strategy for working with my boy now, and I'm just sitting here working it through right now how I can implement it every day and things like this.

If nothing else comes out of this, even if we don't have a single listener, you just changed my [00:33:00] life, Rob. I appreciate it. That's what I'm here for. So let's rewind the tape quite a bit here and just kinda learn about where Rob came from. So I'll just leave that be an open door for you. Obviously you're very well-versed in communication, so I'll let you take it from there.

Thanks. It's been a, an experience. So where did I come from? What's my origin story? Batman style Will. My parents got divorced when I was in second grade and before that, even up beyond that, my dad worked two jobs to pay for everything for us. My mom stayed at home with me for a while until they got divorced, and so my dad was always my memory of my dad.

We got control of the story here and be really accurate. My memory is of my dad is that he was always working and I can remember two possibly. I can remember three occasions that he got on the floor and played with me, and that's it. When I was small and my memories of him was that he was always working or that when he was home, he was working on a [00:34:00] project.

And guys, we get this on the weekends. The weekends are more work than the weekdays. Right. We got a lot of stuff going. My parents got divorced and I saw my dad a lot. My parents did a great job with this. Saw my dad every Wednesday, was with him every other weekend. Still, I lived with my mom. I didn't have a masculine influence in the house until my mom got remarried and I inherited a second father figure who was, uh, entrepreneur, self-employed.

So I got to see more hard work. Really cool. He worked a lot. Got to learn the value of hard work and putting in long hours. He also had the unfortunate coping habit of alcohol. He also spent time in jail when I was in high school. I also remember him and my mom having physical fights when they thought that I was sleek.

Yeah, these things are still hardwired deep into my nervous system, and I got through high school. I went to college. I actually went to college to, I have, I have a degree in history. I can be teaching high school history and government and all that stuff right now if I wanted [00:35:00] to. It's not my path. When I got outta college, I started my career in personal training, which was also my passion, and 10 years in that industry.

Immediately I started climbing the corporate ladder. People. My, my bosses were like, Hey, you work really hard. You're always putting in hours and you're earning lots of money for the department. You're making $10,000 for the department every single month. We like that. So we wonder if you wanna come into leadership.

Within my first, it was 18 months, but 18 months, two years there. And with my, what I learned from my father figures, I was like, well, hell yeah. My dad's a vice president of lending for a bank. So yes, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to climb the ladder, have a title, work really hard, make some money.

And I met a girl at this time and I was like, wow, she's really special. And a year into our relationship, even though I swore I'd never get married because my mom got divorced twice. I didn't wanna put anybody else through that. She swos. She'd never get married. She can count on one hand the amount of times her parents [00:36:00] displayed physical affection in front of them.

I was like, I can't let this one get away. I proposed to her, bought her $12,000 engagement rink, probably more than I needed to spend on it. But I was in this story of I need to work hard. I'm gonna climb the ladder, I'm gonna make lots of money, and here's this girl. Let's spend money to get her. Well, all my coworkers had these fancy Audis, so let me get a really expensive car too.

And within about a year and a half of working in management and getting myself in a position where I couldn't just, I wouldn't, wasn't about to just run my own fitness club, but I would run my entire, run an entire, be the GM of an entire fitness facility, a million plus dollar facility. I was driving to take her to a baseball game for her birthday, and meanwhile I'm CrossFit fit here.

I'm doing CrossFit competitions. I eat really well. I feel like I'm in the middle of CrossFit while, while I'm driving to take her to a ball game. I'm like, this sound right. Okay. My heart is pounding on my [00:37:00] chest. Like I just saw Jessica Rabbit, who was my first crush not happening. My fingernails are dug into the grooves that I had already dug into my steering wheel on my steering wheel.

Didn't realize it wasn't normal to have fingernail grooves in your steering wheel. That's how anxious I was, and I'm trying to catch my breath, like I'm sprinting. I'm like, this is not right. This is when I started to experience living at the edge of panic, and it was this moment that the pain teacher knocked on the door, was like, Hey, I need to let you know you can't ignore me any longer.

Because I had been suppressing my stress underneath mountains of caffeine and nightly alcohol and three to five visits a day to PornHub and working out really hard and working. Really hard and spending endless hours on social media and binge drinks and dates with my wife on the weekend. 'cause that was the only time that we see each other.

And then spending a lot of money, which you can tell from the ring, from the car, and at least twice a year, beach vacations. Oh, we got married on a beach too, which actually turns out to be cheaper than doing it in the States. [00:38:00] Anyway, I was coping, I was suppressing my stress underneath all of that stuff.

And my body was saying, you haven't checked the check engine light, so we're gonna make the car shake. I'm starting to experience this panic, and it was at that moment that I was like, ah, I can't hide this anymore. Something's wrong. I have excessively high blood pressure, dangerously high in my twenties.

My wife and I are more distant and disconnected than ever, and I'm having all of these other problems anymore that I just can't hide anymore, and I need to make a change because with all of that going on, the distance and disconnection in my relationship, even though we were newly married, the mountain of debt that I was starting to build, not to mention it.

The toll it was taking on my own health. I was not in any way fit to serve my wife and I sure as hell wasn't fit to serve any kids that would be running up and down the hallways. So I had heard about breath work and meditation. At this point, I had heard about Wim Hof and cold therapy and how good that was for your vascular system and how doing cold therapy consistently increased the relaxation response in your body and brought stress down.

So I was like, I'm going all in [00:39:00] on this stuff. 'cause my grandfather died with 26 medications on his bedside table. None of them ever helped him. And I was like, I'm not gonna go down that route. I'm not gonna go down the route of having a quadruple bypass surgery when I'm 42. I'm not gonna go down the route of my great-grandfather on the other side who died on stage while performing in his band of a stroke.

What is that from? High blood pressure, clotted arteries, messed up circulation. Well, I'm not gonna go down that route and I'm not gonna follow the path that they they took to try and fix those things. I'm gonna fix this myself. And so in doing that, I started to feel better. People around me started to notice, I woke up to the fact that the ladder I was climbing, this corporate ladder was on the wrong wall.

I was like, I actually don't wanna be here. I'm living someone else's story. My dad's story, my stepdad's story right now. Inherited all of his faulty coping patterns, alcohol and everything else inherited the work. AOL patterns from my dad, who, my dad's dad died when he, my dad was 18. My dad had four siblings that were younger, one older, three younger than him.[00:40:00] 

He had to teach his mom how to drive and he had to take on the role of man in the house and help feed everybody. No wonder why he had this work pattern. The version that I inherited didn't have that service aspect to it, so I just got the damaging. My stepfather saw his mom commit suicide in front of him.

Because of abuse from his dad. No wonder why he had problems. I can't blame them. What I get to do now is see those patterns and I get to put in the work to bring them into the light, to redeem them and to shift them into something different. So this is my transitional character moment. Thank you, my sweetheart.

Thank you for my truck. My son just brought me a truck here. This is my moment where I got to see the patterns, wake up to them and resolve to change them, not just for myself, but for the generations that come after me. The transitional characters, the guy who wakes up, who sees these things and resolve to do the work and does the work, shattering the cycles and forging a new legacy for generations beyond him.

If I didn't get a hold on these things, you better believe my son would be picking them up and my daughter and my wife would [00:41:00] be suffering the consequences of living with a man who was a slave to the cycles. So I started to climb down the ladder. Everybody thought I was crazy. I was like, I just, I don't wanna do this.

I don't wanna live the life that you guys are living. And then as I climbed down the ladder and I became frontline trainer, the. Bosses that I used to work under and alongside started to come to me to train them, but not like in personal training. They're like, we wanna know what you're doing to feel so good right now.

And my coworkers used to come and be like, can I just stand next to you because it feels so calming to be around you? And I didn't ask them for a while. Eventually I asked them, they're like, it just feels good to be in your presence. And I was like, that's weird. And as I started to go deeper and I went through meditation teacher training, and I went through breathwork training, and I went through HeartMath.

Institute training. What I started to realize is, this is what we were talking about with that coherence effect. They were picking up on the groundedness of my nervous system. Hmm. Oh well now I know. In 2025. I know. I didn't know that. And that's what people were picking up on. [00:42:00] That's why they were drawn to me.

'cause it felt good to be around me. 'cause I was admitting this safe feel. And so people started to come to me to teach them that COVID happened, and I had feared starting my own business for so long, but because I had these practices, I was like, Hmm, yeah, that's just fear. That's just stress, and that's not real.

So I'm gonna start my own business. Here we go. COVID happened, and on day one, I called up all my clients. I was like, Hey, we're not shut down. We're starting. I'm starting my own business. Are you ready to go? Here's what it's gonna entail. And they were like, yes. And then I started to post all this stuff on Instagram, and men in particular started to come to me, especially dads.

Cool. Let me train you guys. I'd love to train you guys in this. I realized that I could put this all into a training system, just like the 10 years that I spent in the fitness industry. I could train what these guys were asking for through these breath work and meditation practices. If I'm wanna train somebody for a marathon, okay, well, we can look at the date.

We can work backwards. If I wanna build patience and presence, improve energy, more empathy, deeper connection. [00:43:00] Well, okay, I have these tools, here we go. It's just sets and reps. It's nothing fancier than that. We can hope to remember in the moment, but if we put in those sets and reps, you actually build that skill.

You build that quality. As men, this is what we're missing. We don't have the initiation into these higher levels anymore. As men, we actually need training. We need hard work in order to develop, and I could bring this to them. And so when my wife stood at this back fence, remember we're two people who never wanted to get married.

We also never wanted to get kids. Everybody in our family knew not to ask my wife 'cause she'd bite their heads off. Also, she was a, uh, a boss babe back in the day. Hard to believe. She's stay at home mom. Now she loves that. What an interesting, uh, process that we went through. So when she said, I'm pregnant at the back fence, I didn't have any reaction whatsoever.

'cause I just, I shoved it down. Partly because it was like every month for our entire relationship, she would joke that she was pregnant. So I was like, I don't believe you. And then the other part in my head was. Oh, okay. [00:44:00] Yeah, I know the cycles in my family. I also know all the stories about fatherhood of your life's never gonna be the same with a dose of victim mentality, right?

Your wife's never gonna want you again. You are now the least important person in the family. You're gonna be tired all the time. Say goodbye to your fit body. You're gonna have no time for yourself anymore. And all of these stories about fatherhood, and I looked at them just like I did that moment when I was having this anxiety and this panic, and I said.

Fuck that, just because that's somebody else's story. Just like when I realized I was living my dad's story and my stepfather's story doesn't mean it has to be my story. Just like I was living somebody else's story when I was more distant and disconnected from my wife than ever, even though we were living the dream, doesn't mean that has to be my story.

And so I had all these tools and in that moment when she was like, I'm pregnant, I was like, man, I get to create. Any version of fatherhood that I want. I also had a mentor at that time that told me the same thing. He was like, yeah, [00:45:00] I heard all those stories. And he was like, well, that's nice for you that you feel that way.

Don't put that on me. Don't put that on my wife. He was like, you get to create any version of fatherhood that you want, and that is what got me here. That's what got me here. Leaning in with mentors and brothers shortly after that really helped me overcome the lone wolf pattern that I had inherited, and I was an only child that lived with my mom, so I was a really good stoic hero.

I was a really good clin Clint Eastwood guy, which is what got me in trouble with all of my coping patterns to begin with. I just taped over all that emotional stuff I was feeling with more alcohol, caffeine, porn, whatever. So I wouldn't feel it until the engine was shaking. And sometimes the engine shakes and we listen.

Sometimes we don't and then we end up in bigger trouble. It wasn't until I leaned in with a very high masculine mentor that could actually show me and pull out of me being masculine. 'cause I was really feminized from going, growing up with my mom. And we grew up in the nineties, two thousands feminist era where like it was good to step a.

[00:46:00] Take a step back and let your woman lead. And my wife was a boss babe, and I loved that. Happy wife, happy life. But it wasn't until I leaned in with masculine mentors who when I was talking to them in front of me would coach me up. They're like, where? Like, you're not talking to me from your balls right now.

Where are your balls? Let's go. Bring me more assertiveness, right? You sound like a little boy. Say it again. So that I could drill that and have brothers around me who I could just check in with. Who could either hold me in integrity with what I've said I wanted to do. Who could call me out when I was playing small, or who could just hold space for me in a really masculine way.

It wasn't until I got that that things really shifted for me. You think the breath hook and meditation was a big shift. Having embodied masculine models around me and brothers really changed our entire lives. That's when my wife was finally able to be like, I can relax now. That was the first time that I actually started leading my family and the only reason she was able to relax was because I was leading, was because I was showing up [00:47:00] and being like, Hey babe, I already arra.

I already took ca care of all this stuff. You don't even have to worry about it. You know what? We're going out for a date on Friday. Childcare's already taken care of. It's the kind of place that we're going to, I'm not telling you where we're going be ready for pickup at this time that I started to lead in that way.

That things really changed for us. So yes, it's the practice. It's also brotherhood and it's also having. The embodied model of masculinity in front of you that we really need and that I really needed. And that's why I bring Order of Kings forward for guys who are struggling with the same things that I was and bringing these three massive pillars forward because that's where the transformation is.

I love that, man. So as I was hearing you talk through your entire origin story, right? I love how this all came to be with, we talked about what you do because you heard all the passion and just freedom in your voice. For lack of better words, but it was just, that is who you are, right? But then we went [00:48:00] back through your origin story and I could feel the tension and the anxiety and all that through it.

And that's what I love about you, Rob, is that you're fully authentic in everything. All the way through this story and this awakening. There's, of course, right now we're sitting in May May's Mental Health Month. I have this, it just eats at me, right? There's over 49,000 people who commit suicide in the United States.

Every year, over 80% of those are men, and that just eats at me. I think, you talked about the feminist movement, and your wife being the boss babe, and you know that it was a sense of freedom for her too when you stepped into your masculinity. And I think that's a lot of where we're at right now.

We, I was talking to my wife about it and I. In my W2 job right now, we have this women's group that we all have to fully support this, that, and the other. But there's no way in the world I would ever think about starting a men's group at work. It's just, we still have that push in today's society and [00:49:00] it's time for us to fight back.

And I'm not talking about going out there and blasting society. What I'm talking about is. Fighting with ourselves and bringing that man to the forefront, letting this guy be the leader of his family, letting this guy be the leader out in society and bring back masculinity one man at a time. So we're on the same mission.

And I loved hearing that story, man. It was, it was absolutely phenomenal. I've had a lot of the same struggles in my story, so it was real emotional for me as we went through Order of Kings. That's your flagship coaching right now? Yes. Where can people find that? How do they join? How do they sign up?

Yeah. Easiest place to find me is on Instagram, the Uncommon Dad, and the link is always in the bio there. You can also go to uncommon dads.com and that'll take you to the Order of Kings, which is what we're running now towards the end of the summer. I'll also do Jedi father training, which is a four week.

Initiation into this stuff. It's I'm gonna [00:50:00] open up the fire hydrant for you, and you, you get what you get. So we spend four weeks going through it. Order of Kings is 16 weeks of high intensity development. So we're gonna have all the sets and reps in the dojo. You wake up the trainings on your phone every single day.

We check in in the brotherhood every day, face to camera. It's no typing. Now I we're, you're gonna record yourself for 30 seconds to 60 seconds to check in because like I said, most communication. It's nonverbal, so we're really gonna see what's going on and we can support you or challenge you or say, you know what?

Yeah, I've been there too with my wife. That really sucks, man. Here's one thing that helped us, and it's crazy how much men shift just through the brotherhood alone, without even me being there to help with all the other guys, supporting each other. It's crazy. So it's 16 weeks? Oh, absolutely. Daily training brotherhood.

We have a weekly two to two and a half hour brotherhood call where we're gonna do some kind of hard work together, often as yoga. And then we're gonna get into the other sets and reps. So we do communication boot camps and all of that stuff [00:51:00] that you eventually take to your wife. So you upskill in communication, you practice with her, and then when things get hard, you guys start to communicate better.

You get empathy, training, all of that stuff. That's Order of King's, man, because if we wanna lead for our family, but also the world, there's no king that does it alone. He has to have men and brothers by his side. Look at Leonis. Look at William Wallace. Look at Aragorn and Lord of the Rings. They're all surrounded by their band of brothers.

Lone wolf dies alone in the wild. Wild. Even though it is a sexy story, he doesn't make it very. Far right and is mm, an unconscious, concerted effort to keep us isolated. Yeah. I'd never start a men's group. Why will, 'cause we all think that we need to do it alone, but if we can lift our eyes up and recognize that we're meant to be a part of a fire team, we're meant to be part of a hunting party.

We're not actually meant to be around women and children meant to be around each other. Because it's a man who makes a man. That's when things will [00:52:00] change, not just in our families, but in the whole wide world. Absolutely. I couldn't have said it any better myself, man. Hey, one final thought here before I let you go.

I know your family is the most important thing to you. Probably second to your own personal wellbeing, but I rarely move the time that I record. But I'm doing this on Saturday morning right now, not my normal time, but the way that you responded to me when I reached out to you for this interview, it hit me pretty deeply because this was a man that.

I reached out to him and he is no, man, I, I don't give up the weekdays. That's my, my wife and my, my children time. And I just wanted to let you know that I, I fully respected that and that's why we did this on Saturday. It's not something that I normally do. Most people it's their schedule or whatever, but that meant a lot to me when you responded back that way.

So I appreciate that, man, because it hit me as well, appreciate you, man. This has been a very impactful episode for me. I'm taking a lot away. It's gonna change the dynamic with my family. I can already feel it. [00:53:00] So wanna give you all the love today, man. Appreciate you coming on sharing this wealth and knowledge with my listeners and myself.

Got it. Thank you, Rob. It's been an honor being here, man. All right. Appreciate you brother.