Edition #11 | Presence Over Performance: What Your Family Really Needs

For a long time I believed the best thing I could do for my family was perform. Perform at work so I could provide and perform at home so no one could say I wasn’t doing my part. Always moving, always producing, always chasing the next thing that would prove I was enough.

Ostensibly, it seemed to work, but inside my home, a tension was building: my kids weren’t asking for a better performer. They were asking for a present father.

I had confused two things that aren’t the same. I thought providing was the same as being present. It isn’t, and my kids knew the difference long before I did. Most of us were raised to believe a good father provides, but it is one of those inherited beliefs we never stopped to examine. Providing matters, but it isn’t the same as showing up.

Presence isn’t complicated, but it’s demanding in a way performance is not. Performance asks for your energy. Presence asks for your attention—real, undivided, unhurried attention, which is the scarcest thing most of us have left at the end of a long, hard day. A present father is how a child first comes to feel truly known. Your children will remember very little about your career, but your presence will become their inheritance.

Read: Presence Over Performance

This week’s article goes deeper into the difference between being there and being fully present, and the performance trap that follows us home.

Here’s what I will leave you with this Saturday. On the drive home one day this week, ask yourself one question before you walk through your front door: what does my family need from me in the next two hours? Then put the phone away, look up, and be in the moment. Not as a performer. As a father.

Still learning this alongside you,

Scott