Gap to Gig – Working Dads' Guide to Fatherhood, Meaningful Work, & Finding Balance in Life

What would your life look like if fear stopped making your decisions?

Chris Woods spent decades building a successful career, including leadership roles at Google. From the outside, everything looked like it was working. But underneath the success was a constant fear of failure, loss, and not measuring up.

Everything changed when Chris flatlined in a hospital bed at age 40. The experience forced him to take a hard look at what was dr...

What happens when the conversations working dads avoid at home start affecting every other part of their lives?

Mylena Sutton believes leadership is not something you turn on at work and leave behind at home. The way you handle conflict, stress, shame, communication, and emotional pressure follows you everywhere. For working dads trying to balance career demands, parenting, relationships, and personal identity, that truth can be unc...

What if success is not about building generational wealth, but building generational habits?

Jason VanDevere walked away from a future most people would never leave behind. Instead of taking over his family’s successful auto dealership business, he chose to build his own path through entrepreneurship, real estate investing, and coaching.

Becoming a father changed how he thinks about ambition, work life balance, and what success...

How do you stay calm, present, and emotionally available when life keeps pulling you in every direction at once?

Colin C. Thompson believes the answer starts with mental fitness. As a coach, speaker, and certified Positive Intelligence practitioner, Colin works with people who feel stuck between pressure, responsibility, and the constant demands of work and family life. His approach focuses on helping dads recognize the thought patt...

Why do so many working dads feel exhausted even when they’re doing everything "right"?

Dr. Matt Campbell believes the problem is not that most people are broken. It’s that they’re depleted.

Matt is a clinical psychologist and creator of the Primal Five Framework, which focuses on five foundational areas that shape how we show up every day: sleep, sunlight, movement, connection, and consumption. His work explores how...

What happens when your life changes faster than you can process it?

For Mike Weyandt, the shift into fatherhood came all at once. A long, uncertain adoption process suddenly turned into bringing home a newborn in a matter of weeks. At the same time, his career path was in flux, and shortly after, the world shut down.

What followed was a season filled with constant change, new responsibilities, and very little time to step back and ma...

What does it actually look like to rebuild your life after everything falls apart?

Rob Capili has lived through it. Divorce, career pivots, identity shifts, and the long process of starting over while still showing up as a father. His path has never been linear. From tech to filmmaking to music to entrepreneurship, he has followed curiosity, taken risks, and learned the hard way what matters and what doesn’t.

But some of his mo...

What if the life you’re building is the very thing draining you?

Faisal Ensaun’s journey spans survival, addiction, reinvention, and ultimately building a life rooted in purpose, ownership, and alignment. From immigrating out of a war-torn country to hitting personal rock bottom, he rebuilt his life by asking harder questions than most people are willing to face.

Today, as a coach, entrepreneur, and father, Faisal works w...

What happens when you do everything right on paper… and still feel like something is off?

Anthony Kuo knows that feeling firsthand. From performing at Carnegie Hall at 17 to climbing the corporate ladder after graduating from NYU Stern, he checked every box most people chase. But underneath the external success, something never quite clicked.

Now a career satisfaction coach and founder of Untamed Career, Anthony helps high ach...

What does it really mean to succeed as a dad when work, ambition, and identity are all pulling in different directions?

Shaun Dawson, tech leader, father of two, and host of the Raising Men podcast, challenges the idea that success is defined by output alone. He shares a more grounded perspective on fatherhood, work life balance, and what working dads often get wrong when they focus too heavily on providing financially while overloo...

What if the reason work feels off is not the job itself, but a lack of clarity about what you are actually built to do?

Paul Comfort has spent decades helping people identify their strengths, align their careers with purpose, and build lives that feel both successful and meaningful. His work centers on the idea that most people never take the time to understand what they are uniquely wired to do.

For dads trying to navigate fatherhoo...

What if the way you show up after the game matters more than the game itself?

After more than three decades coaching and mentoring young people, Antwaun Thompson has seen a clear shift. Kids today are facing more pressure, less confidence, and more noise than ever before. And for many parents, especially working dads trying to navigate fatherhood and work-life balance, it's not always clear how to support them the right way.

This con...

Why does work that once energized you start to feel like something you can’t turn off?

Dr. David Shar studies what happens when people fall out of love with their work and why that shift often happens long before anyone notices. His research shows that for working dads, the challenge is not just workload. It is how work connects to identity, purpose, and the life you are trying to build at home.

This conversation reframes passi...

What if the biggest gap between your work and your life is not your schedule, but how you define success?

Alan Lazaros built what most people would call a successful life. High income, fast growth, and clear upward momentum. But after a near-fatal car accident at 26, he was forced to confront a harder question. Was any of it actually meaningful?

For working dads trying to balance ambition, work-life balance, and presence at home, thi...

Why do so many working dads feel disconnected from their kids even when they are physically present?

Modern fatherhood comes with pressures that did not exist a generation ago. Constant work demands, two-income households, packed schedules, and technology that never turns off have pushed many families into reactive mode. And when stress builds, connection is often the first thing to break.

Dr. David Marcus, a clinical psychologist wi...

What happens when you realize the career you built doesn’t actually align with the life you want?

Scott Maderer built a successful career in finance, checked the right boxes, and did the things ambitious professionals are supposed to do. But eventually he realized something important was missing. The work that once looked impressive on paper no longer felt connected to his values, his purpose, or the kind of impact he wanted t...

What happens when your self-worth quietly becomes tied to your output?

After nearly two decades leading digital transformation work for major brands, Loren Silverman realized that success on paper didn’t equal fulfillment in real life. The titles, the grind, the constant responsibility all looked right from the outside. But underneath, something felt off.

That realization didn’t lead to a dramatic overnight reinvention. I...

What does meaningful work actually look like once you become a parent?

For many professionals, the answer changes. Priorities shift. Energy changes. The things that once felt exciting or important can suddenly feel disconnected from the life you want to build.

Career strategist Julia Toothacre works with high-performing professionals who look successful on paper but quietly feel stuck, burned out, or misaligned. Her work focuses on h...

What if the key to balance is not working less, but working with intention?

Alex Tuck runs a remote-first consulting firm from a farm in Vermont while raising four young kids with his wife. His approach is simple but disciplined: block the time, protect the priorities, and design work to fit life, not the other way around.

From quarterly OKRs to daily timeboxing, Alex has built both a company and a family rhythm around clarity and st...