Being a life sprinter can have tremendous career benefits but the best way to get through the mud of life with kids may just be to trudge through it.
That realization has allowed Jay Acunzo, who advises executives on how to be better speakers and was once the ultimate life sprinter, to change how he viewed fatherhood and become the Lead Dad that his family needed.
“Before the pandemic, I was much more prone to keeping parenting on project management mode as I was experiencing everything in my career,” said Jay, our Lead Dad of the Week who lives outside of Boston. “Now it’s the reverse. I want to enjoy my career. But I’ll drop all that stuff to be with my children. I’m more likely to trade off career success for time with my kids, and I’m more comfortable with that now.”
Like many people who had kids during the pandemic, Jay at first thought his family life would return to what it had been before. His wife, who is a psychology professor at Tufts University, had their second child after the pandemic started. (That son is now 3; their daughter is 6.) Their second child arrived around the same time his business – traveling the country as a key-note speaker and advising executives in person – ground to a halt.
Add to that an almost total lack of childcare options. “I was holding up a wad of cash asking preschools to take it, and I couldn’t find a spot,” he said. “On top of that, I was trying to cram 70 hours of work into 30 hours each week.”
It was a call with a friend who is a surgeon that changed his outlook. “We were trying to reassure each other that we would get to the other side of this,” he said. “Instead, this is our new reality, and we need to talk about it.”
He accepted that and pivoted his business so that he could still engage in highly creative work and coach executives, while also doing so with an awareness of how to allocate his time to be family first.
Welcome, Jay, to The Company of Dads. It sounds to us that in trudging through, you’ve figured out the important things for parenting today.
