Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom,

and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

It's a noisy world out there, and most of us add to the din.

We chatter on social media,

we chatter on the phone, we chatter over email. Even as parents, we tend to do a lot of talking.

There are all the things we tell our kids, the things we remind them about, the lessons we try

to teach them, the books we read to them, but it's worth remembering that ancient saying,

two ears, one mouth. We recently interviewed award-winning psychologist and best-selling author

Dr. Stuart Friedman about his new book, Parents Who Lead. Dr. Friedman has been researching

and writing about leadership and work-life integration for over three decades,

so we are curious if he had any advice for dads. He said, my favorite is about how much parents

have to gain by learning how to listen with leadership skill to their children about what they need.

It's often quite surprising to hear what's actually on their minds and how you can be a better

leader in your family when you know what's in the hearts and the minds of those precious people

who look up to you. One father who's keen to impress upon his son the value of curiosity and

study asked him what he was interested in learning. To his utter delight, his son said, I want to

learn to vacuum. His son wanted to be

useful. He wanted to contribute and have a purpose himself. You don't really know, in other words,

what's inside until you pay attention with dedication and compassion like effective leaders do.

As we've said here before, that little fellow is always trying to tell you things. Of course,

...