Episode #47 - Trevor Alexander | All about your hobbies and balancing your life

Trevor Alexander – Diversity Dad show notes Today’s episode is all about your hobbies and balancing your life around your partner and your kids. Trevor Alexander is our guest and he will share his experiences being a dad, a gamer and a husband and how he and his friends came up with the podcast New Dad Gaming. “I was always really dedicated to work and always on the startup life. Which classically you can see as 80 hours weeks. Just complete dedication to the craft and the work and trying to build something new and great. With fatherhood what that represented was a need to shift, you cannot have those types of hours and then reasonably be a good father. You have to commit time as you well know, your son or daughter becomes the most important thing in your life.” Trevor is a great example of “work hard, play harder” as we will learn from all of the experiences he shares on this interview. Through the course of the conversation we will learn how he slowly started to realize that he needed to find a way of balancing all of his responsibilities and passions as he was getting ready to be a dad and it is amazing to see how he makes that balance happen in his life. “I think it goes a long way to support and focus on the partner as much as it does on the child.” And he does not do it alone, one of the main aspects of his approach to this balance in life is the way he builds this beautiful partnership with his wife where they are constantly switching roles and enabling each other to dedicate time to all of their passions, the biggest one being parents to their son, which in turn makes them not only better people but also better parents.  “It is like who are you as a human or as a father if your entire impetus is just that very narrative (being a dad) as opposed to having some likes, having some interests, like having hobbies, having opinions and thoughts beyond just fatherhood. So having these tiny moments, or these hobbies or these things that you can participate in kind of draws you out as a person I ultimately felt. As long as your priorities are set properly, you are never impacting proper development or the responsibilities you have, there should absolutely be some time where you can express yourself into the hobbies or the interests that you have.” Trevor is the living testimony that balance is a reachable goal. If everyone works together a strong family, with strong parents and strong kids and strong relationships can be created. But it is not all roses, certainly there are hardships and troubles that will come from time to time, and time and time again we have heard about being patient on the Diversity Dad Podcast and Trevor makes the message even stronger through his experiences.     “My wife, about six months in with our son had suffered very severe postpartum depression, which is hard to describe just how horrific kind of disease that is. (…) That was really just a matter of stepping up, being patient, getting the help that we needed, which is a lot of honesty about it. It certainly was a really dark time to go through but I don’t that I would ever be able to express how incredibly strong my wife was to be able to weather it as she did and to the strength that it would take for her to reach out and for us to find the help that we needed.” Finally we hope that you come out of this interview inspired to pursue your passions and help your partner in the same journey. Inspired to create a strong family that can overcome any barriers and issues that can and will come as a unit that work together for each other.     OTHER QUOTES:  “I am very fortunate my lovely wife is from Colombia and that has become a really important part for us. We really want my son to know his Colombian heritage, that half of his life. So we are teaching him Spanish, we had a number of trips to Colombia to make sure that he soaks up as much of the culture as possible. Just insuring that his upbringing isn’t just a product of exactly where he is at but really a representation of everything around him and where both parents are coming from. So you can speak to both sides.” If I had to break it down I would probably say (what has me the most excited about being a dad) getting to know my son. I am very sure you must have experienced it yourself where as they start to grow their personalities start s to bud. I think in many ways a lot of the way he will be will be result of how we raise him of course, but so much of it does seem to be his makeup, like he is himself, and he is really just becoming himself. And to watch that, to see who he is growing to be, to see how he reacts, to see his personality, his likes, dislikes, like “is he going to be a dancer?”, “is he going to be a basketball player?”. How he approaches life, how he interacts and talk, it is incredibly exciting to see where he is going to go.” “Right now his imagination is starting to take hold. And you are seeing where he is just taking two or three random toys or random objects and interacting. Like playing, driving story lines between these things. You can’t quite get into his head but you can see the gears starting to turn, starting to have this imagination. And that has been just mind boggling.” “If anything that is really the very impetus of the show (New Dad Gaming Podcast), it is the constant struggle of that desire to partake in this hobby that you have always enjoyed so much and the rigors and the requirements of fatherhood.” “What has brought me a lot of relief in many ways has been what I call the easy dedication. The son absolutely takes priority over anything. I almost call a blessing to say I have never been torn where it like “oh, I have to hang out with my son instead of playing games.” I feel very lucky that that has never really been the impulse.” “It is all about finding that escapism. What takes your mind away from the pressures of life or just other things going on in your life. And I think Trevor nailed it right there, it is having that appreciation for both (being a dad and gaming).”   LINKS: New Dad Gaming Website http://newdadgaming.com/ Twitter – @NewDadGaming https://twitter.com/newdadgaming     “Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together. Let’s be dads together. Peace.”