Front Row Dads with Jon Vroman

Most men only know two things to do with anger: stuff it down or blow up.

Connor Beaton has a third way. This is 15 minutes of pure gold from the conversation Jon had with Connor back in 2023. Connor is the founder of ManTalks and author of Men's Work, and here he walks through the four steps he uses the moment he feels it rising, starting with what 3 a.m. and a son who wouldn't sleep did to him.

The four steps:

1. Know the signs in your body

2. Name it out loud

3. Say what you're actually feeling underneath it

4. Get out of your head and into your body, with your breath

Hear the full conversation with Connor: https://frontrowdads.com/378

FRD Live 2026 is December 2 to 4 in Austin, Texas. Stay to the end to hear a member describe his first one, then grab your spot: https://frontrowdads.com/live

The book list that's changed how our guys show up at home: https://frontrowdads.com/podcast-books

There is no greater leadership than the example of a life lived, says Kevin Walton. He is a father, a spiritual guide, and one of our guest leaders at FRD Live 2026.

Ali Jafarian talks with Kevin about what embodiment means, the book his mom gave him that made him say "I'm not crazy," and the dream that gave him the name Creatorhood. Then they get to how Kevin fits being a man, a father, and a teacher into one life. He looks for harmony instead of balance, and when he is away teaching for days he says he is dedicating himself to the work, not sacrificing time with his son.

Coming to FRD Live 2026

Kevin will be with us in person at FRD Live 2026, December 2 to 4 in Austin, Texas. Three days for family men with businesses, built around the man, the family, and the business. Find out more at https://frontrowdads.com/live

Follow Kevin: @sourceradiance on Instagram.

For years Rudi Riekstins left his faith, his marriage, and his two babies at the office door, and walked in every morning pretending to be a company man. Then he stopped pretending.

Ali Jafarian sits down with Rudi, a leadership coach, father of two, and one of our guest leaders at FRD Live 2026. They get into what your family feels when you walk in the door, the day someone wrecked his wife's car in the middle of his son's big flag football day, what his father-in-law told him before he could ask to marry his daughter, the afternoon he came downstairs and told his kids he just needed a hug, and why the whole family voted on the move to Montana.

COMING TO FRD LIVE 2026

Rudi will be with us in person at FRD Live 2026, December 2 to 4 in Austin, Texas. Three days for family men with businesses, built around the man, the family, and the business. Find out more at https://frontrowdads.com/live

Follow Rudi: @rudiriekstins on Instagram, rudiriekstins.com, and the InPowered Life Podcast.

Jon has spent ten years telling men to put family first. For the last two months he's worked dawn to dinner, some weeks seven days straight, and he thinks that's okay.

This is Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no editing. Just Jon on an early morning walk by a pond in his neighborhood, talking to you the way he would if you were buddies and you asked him, "What's real in your world?" You'll hear wind and a few geese. That's part of it.

His answer this morning: there are seasons when a man should go all in. When the bison come through, you go hunt. Tell your family it's coming, give it an end date, and keep brothers around who will bring you home when it's over. He also thinks your kids should see it: "I think it's great for the kids to see dad go do something, to go climb that mountain."

Front Row Dads is a brotherhood of family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. Learn more at frontrowdads.com

Our biggest event of the year is now open to the public. Find out more and experience the best of FRD. Https://frontrowdads.com/live Ryan Levesque runs meeting rhythms for a living. So he installed one at home, and he knew that if he walked in announcing it, it would go badly.

He rolled it out the way he rolls out anything at the company. One piece a week for six or seven weeks, with his kids at four and seven and his wife the skeptic. What they ended up with is seven parts, every Sunday morning after breakfast, thirty to forty-five minutes. The date. Wins. Gratitude that has to be specific. A weekly challenge, which is how a seven-day vegan week happened at his son's suggestion. Family values the kids wrote, nineteen of them, cut down to five. Family goals that cannot come top down. And the week ahead.

Stay for the last three minutes. He and Jon trade the dinner-table games their families use, question of the day and happy-crappy-healthy, and he finishes on the question that decides whether a ritual stays: but is it serving?

IN THIS EPISODE

• Rolling it out with micro-commitments so nobody revolts
• All seven parts, named and walked through one at a time
• The weekly challenge, and the seven-day vegan week his son proposed
• Letting the kids write the family values, and cutting nineteen down to five
• Family goals distilled from an annual vision down to pages read this week
• Why none of it works if it comes top down
• Structure as the banks of a river
• Question of the day, and "happy crappy healthy"
• Knowing when to add something, and when to stop it

FULL EPISODE

https://frontrowdads.com/143

Looking for something to do as a family tonight? We crowdsourced a list of the best board games, card games, and everything in between from our own community — games that get the screens down and the family playing, laughing, and talking trash together after dinner or on a rainy Saturday. Some you can knock out in ten minutes. Some are a two-hour epic. Get the list at https://frontrowdads.com/games

Mark Groves is 46 years old, and the conversation he keeps coming back to happened in a car when he was in his twenties with his father.

He had gone to his father complaining about a girlfriend, and he had said something to her he is not proud of. His dad told him that a relationship is a separate entity. There is you, there is her, and there is the thing between you, and that third thing has to be cared for. Mark still remembers exactly where he was sitting.

That is the point of this one. A father's influence does not switch off when his kids leave the house.

IN THIS EPISODE

• The car conversation: a relationship is a separate entity
• Why a father's influence does not stop at eighteen
• "Nothing will ever divide this family," and what it did to hear it
• Learning to drive, the standard lines, and the egg under the gas pedal
• The construction site rule, and what happened when mom found out
• His father's first marriage, and "that's what I learned from it"
• Getting caught, and the grace his dad offered on the drive home

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is all about? The Brotherhood Experience is a free, one-hour online session where you meet other like-minded men who are committed to being family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. You will hear the core ethos and values behind the community, and why this brotherhood is a strategy for connecting with your kids, building a thriving marriage, and winning in business. It runs every month.

Pick a time that works for you: https://frontrowdads.com/experience

Jon asked a pediatrician of thirty-five years for the formula for influencing your kids. She gave him three words.

Dr. Meg Meeker, author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, says her job is to speak to dads on behalf of their children. So Jon asked the question every man here eventually asks, which is some version of just tell me what to do. She gave him a list. Attention, affection, acceptance. Whether your child is two or twenty-two or fifty, they want the same three things from you, and the third one is where most of us quietly fail.

The part that will sting is the grocery store. You are listing what your daughter has done to someone you ran into, straight A's, varsity as a sophomore, and she is standing right behind you. "She doesn't feel accepted. She feels like a performer."

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why a pediatrician speaks to fathers on behalf of their kids
• The formula for influence, and why men want it as a checklist
• Attention: whether your child is 2 or 22 or 50, they want to be seen
• Affection, and how it changes shape without going away as a daughter grows
• Acceptance, and the grocery store conversation that turns a kid into a performer
• The elite swimmer whose whole relationship with her dad was built on the sport
• What acceptance means when your kid genuinely disappoints you
• "If our acceptance of them is predicated on them turning out the way we envision, we're cooked"

FULL EPISODE: https://frontrowdads.com/459

📚 Want to win at home and in business?

These are the books that helped high-performing dads create deeper relationships and stronger lives—without sacrificing success.

👉 Get the list: https://frontrowdads.com/podcast-books

Every couple has a dance, and most men have never seen the steps written down.

One of you closes the distance and gets louder. The other creates distance and shuts down. What makes it a loop rather than an argument is that each one's way of coping is precisely the thing the other cannot tolerate. Mark Groves names it, then takes it apart: Gottman's four horsemen, why men stonewall more than women do, and the single sentence that breaks a defensive pattern even though saying it feels awful.

Then the harder half. Groves admits he spent years in a relationship with someone who needed exactly the skills he teaches, and asks the question underneath it: what if you need the problem to be there? What if the fixing is the point?

IN THIS EPISODE

• The dance: the distancer, the escalator, and why the loop holds
• Gottman's four horsemen, and why men stonewall
• "I can see some truth in what you're saying," and why it tastes terrible
• Behind every criticism is a desired behavior
• "Our defense strategies live beside our greatest wounds"
• The kitchen, the deal breaker that kept moving, and what he said instead
• What happens to the fixer when the addict gets sober
• Why nobody should be 100 percent in with someone who is 99
• Unconscious commitments, and needing a battle to fight
• Jon on creating problems at home to have something to bring to the room

FULL EPISODE

How to Co-Regulate: The Science Behind Relationship Harmony: https://frontrowdads.com/474

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is all about? The Brotherhood Experience is a free, one-hour online session where you meet other like-minded men who are committed to being family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. You will hear the core ethos and values behind the community, and why this brotherhood is a strategy for connecting with your kids, building a thriving marriage, and winning in business. It runs every month. Pick a time that works for you at https://frontrowdads.com/experience

Jon walked into a band meeting with seven things to do and walked out with one.

Episode 4 of Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Jon Vroman walking the lake in downtown Austin on a Wednesday afternoon, thinking out loud. The audio is rough on purpose: traffic, wind, and footsteps are part of the deal.

He recorded this straight out of his monthly band meeting, where he put business on the table. Two things he admits he hasn't always done well: saying his truth out loud instead of withholding it to spare feelings, and being humble enough to ask for counsel. He did both. Then his buddy Tim kept saying the same thing until it stuck: "there's only one thing you need to do after this meeting," and until it's done with excellence, don't do two.

IN THIS WALK:

• What a band is, if you're new here: four to six men, monthly, real conversations
• Withholding isn't lying, but it isn't the truth either
• Lead domino, five whys, communal drive: the FRD core values, and the one he wasn't living
• Ideation is his top strength, and why that means he needs editors around him
• The method in one breath: reveal, get curious, lean on your trusted advisors, pick one thing, execute, follow through

Front Row Dads is a brotherhood of family men with businesses, not businessmen with families. To learn more, go to frontrowdads.com.

She calls it puberty in reverse. It can last a decade. And most husbands have no idea it's happening.

LIVE WITH DR. HIRSCH, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8TH.

She is joining the Front Row Dads community for a live session with Q&A on how men can support the women in their lives through menopause. Free for members, and a limited number of guest passes for everyone else. Details at frontrowdads.com/menopause

Dr. Heather Hirsch is board-certified in internal medicine, founded the Menopause and Midlife Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital, taught at Harvard Medical School, and has treated thousands of women through perimenopause and menopause. She flew to Austin for this one because, in her words, most of the conversation about menopause happens with women, and it's the men who share a bed, a marriage, and a family with them who never get the briefing. This is that briefing.

She defines the terms every husband should know, explains what actually happens as the hormones flicker out like a failing light bulb, and walks through what it does to sleep, mood, memory, weight, skin, and sex. Then the practical half: how to bring it up without saying "this explains everything," why tracking symptoms beats blood work, the bedroom at 65 degrees, why so many women see five to seven doctors before the right diagnosis, and what real treatment looks like.

Her story is the first 20 minutes. The practical breakdown starts at 19:56.

• Find a trained clinician: menopause.org or heatherhirschdirectory.com
• Her books: Unlock Your Menopause Type and The Perimenopause Survival Guide
• Follow her: @heatherhirschmd

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? We run a live Brotherhood Experience most months. Jon and a few other dads, 60 minutes on Zoom, and a real conversation about how fatherhood is actually going. It's not a webinar, and you won't leave drained. On any given week, most dads give support and never get any. That's what this hour is for. It's free, and the next date and your seat are both at frontrowdads.com/experience