Do you feel like you are living in your dad's shadow?

Like you can't step away from it. Like everywhere you go, you feel like you need to live up to his standards.

Well, if that's the way you feel, you're not alone because this is something that the majority of men face. I included have felt this challenge and my dad's not even around, he passed away, but I still have this internal desire to make him proud.

So if you are facing this, it's important that you tackle this right away because you can spend your entire life living in your father's shadow without full acknowledgement of your own identity, who you are and being fully fulfilled in your own shoes and not having to constantly live up to your father's expectations and shoes. This happens a lot, especially in family business.

If you are taking over the family business from your father, then there's this expectation that you may run this business similar to the way that your father did, or maybe it's your parents that built the business, but you are trying to live up to your dad's standards and that can be a little bit dangerous. And this again is very common, but it is a challenge. You're not the only one facing this.

And I've seen a lot of guys, even in their forties or fifties, who feel like they aren't their own men, that they're just an extension of their dad. And in some way, shape or form, what ends up happening is you lose your freedom. You feel like you are being controlled, even though you might not be directly controlled, maybe it's indirectly, maybe it's not conscious, maybe it's unconscious from your dad's perspective.

But there is this feeling of being controlled in your life, like you're living under someone else's shadow or roof or rules or expectations.

And that's not fun because the thing that we want most in life as men is freedom, the freedom to be our own selves, the freedom to have our own identity, our own values, to do the things we want to do with the people that we want to do them with, not necessarily do it based on someone else's standards.

So if you're living in your dad's shoes or shadow, you are stifling that ability to have your own freedom. So there's three things that you need to pay attention to. The first one is acknowledging that you are separate from your dad. You are not your dad. You are not an extension of your dad. You just share DNA. You are part of the same family. But you are not a limb.

You're not like an extended arm for your dad. You're not like a third leg. You are a separate individual with your own identity and you need to sometimes cut yourself off. And I'm not saying you stop associating with your dad or you don't visit or you don't have conversations or you exit the family business.

What I'm saying is you need to identify that you are a separate person with your own identity and your own family. Right. You have the responsibility to create the life that you deserve to have, not the life that your dad wants you to have. And that requires you to separate yourself off.

In fact, I'm sure your spouse, if you're feeling like you're in your dad's shadow, I'm sure your spouse is seeing that. And your spouse may be getting frustrated that you continue to try to live up to somebody else's standards and not be your own man. And so he or she will be completely happy with you being your separate person and carving out your own family.

So that's the first thing that you need to do is be separate. And you may need to do that in a very tactful way, because sometimes what ends up happening is when I see this happen, especially if you're involved in a family business is that there's, you know, sometimes the father can get a little bit uncomfortable because control over their son is a way for them to feel that freedom as well.

And it's a really weird and odd way of looking at life, but this is what parents do a lot of the times is they use that control for their own benefit, even though they may not know it. And even though it's a detriment to their children. So your father may or may not know it, but he may be instilling control over you to satisfy his own need.

And you got to get out of that control. You got to step out of that control, because as long as you're being controlled, you're never going to be able to be your own person. That's as simple as that. The second thing is you got to stop looking for admiration or validation from your father. And this is a tough one. I felt it and I still feel it to this day.

My dad wanted me to be a doctor and I didn't become a doctor. Went off and did my own thing in terms of business and in the corporate world. And in a lot of ways I disappointed him. And I felt that disappointment because I never got that validation, even though I was successful in all the things that I did, extremely successful. I still didn't get that validation.

And so to this day, I still feel, and I always ask myself, do I get a PhD?

He wanted me to become a medical doctor, but I was, I still think about getting a PhD because that's a doctorate. And then I could, you know, somehow, even my dad, my dad's in heaven. I can show my dad and make him proud, right. And give myself the validation that I thought he would give to me. But I don't need that.

And that's not something you need either, because you are here based on your own merits and the only person that should be validating you is you. Cause if you are seeking out validation from your dad or your parents or other people, it's a tough road to go down because you're just going to continue to feed that narrative.

The moment you start looking for validation internally from yourself, that's when you take true control over your life. And you may work your butt off.

And I've seen this happen to so many men, especially if you're a family business, you may be helping grow the business to such a large degree, but you never get that credit, you never get that validation, or you may have a career on the side and be extremely successful and you still may not get that credit or validation.

Now, how discouraging is that you've given everything you have, you've accomplished great things and that validation isn't there. That sucks, but you got to get away from it. You got to get away from it because very few parents actually validate their children and it's probably one of the biggest plagues that we have in the parenting style these days because it can cause a lot of harm to children.

It's this feeling inside that continues to eat away at you and you continue to do more and more and more to get the validation, but you never get it. So it's that endless cycle. It's like spinning. It's like spinning your wheel. You can't do it for very long. So you got to get that out of you. Third element is to build a life outside of the family business.

If you're working a family business and this is a common thing when you're at the dinner table, you're talking about business. When you're on vacations, you end up talking about business. When you're with your significant other and your family, you're talking about business, like it, it just consumes your family gatherings. It consumes your family conversations. It consumes your life.

Family business can become your entire life to the point where when I work with families, they seem to believe that they are their family separate from their business. They always bring the two together. They are a business family, not thinking that the family is separate than the actual business.

And so if you've created that identity around you, then it's tough for you to step out of your dad's shadow because it's part of who you are. And it's the main part of who you are, that family business just consumes you because everything around your family has been the success of the business or the growth of that business or the challenges that your family faced in terms of growing that business.

And so you lose your identity outside of the family business or outside of your parents. So you got to be able to have that identity outside. That could be going and having a larger network of friends outside of the family business or family, or that may even include you having hobbies, interests and growth outside of the family business.

It's things that you are not even associated with your family, nothing to do with your dad whatsoever. So sometimes this is something that I work with guys on.

I always ask, what are your dad's interests?

What does he like to do?

What are his hobbies?

And then they'll write down a list and then I get them to write down a list of things that they might enjoy doing that has nothing to do or not even aligned or not even in that category that their dad's hobbies. It's completely not a part of your dad's hobby.

So for example, if your dad likes basketball and hockey, you may think of something completely different like soccer or swimming, something completely different, because that will enable you to create something outside of your dad. Now it's nice to have things aligned with your dad as well. You can share things, obviously. That's just a part of being family.

So you can actually go and maybe you guys both enjoy hockey and you're both watching a hockey game together. You can tell them Canadian because I talk about hockey more than I talk about anything else, but you don't want to lose sight of that. But you have to have your own interests outside of what you're, that involves your dad. You got to build that life outside and have a balance.

And again, that's a core concept of being the complete man. It's not just about business. It's about being complete in all aspects of your life. And if you haven't gotten a copy of my book, the complete man, it's available on Amazon and all retailers. You can go to complete man book.com.

If you want the physical copy or complete man audio.com, if you want the digital audio and you can use a promo code victory, the word victory and the number 75 altogether to get 75% off when you go to complete man audio.com for the digital versions.

So again, just to recap. If you want to step outside your dad's shadow, if you want to be truly free. And live a life based on your standards, based on your own expectations and be completely fulfilled and satisfied. Remember you can't do it if you're doing it based on someone else's expectations, especially your dad's. Then you have to do these three things.

First of all, you have to separate yourself from your dad. You have to acknowledge that you are a separate person, a separate individual, separate human being. You just happen to share some DNA and some other aspects as well. You got to put that in your head.

Second, you got to stop looking for admiration or validation from your dad. That's not going to help you. The more and harder you work, the less likely you are to get it. If you haven't gotten it already. And the third element is you got to build a life outside of your dad or the family business. And that means that you got to step outside the norms and do things differently.

If you do these three elements, it will be a lot easier for you to live in your own shoes and not your dad's shoes. And actually be complete and fulfilled in life.