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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
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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
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
FULL EPISODE: https://frontrowdads.com/459
đź“š 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
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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:
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.
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
Most of us don't have a plan for our marriage. We have a repair schedule.
Something breaks, we patch it, things are fine for a while, and then we sit there quietly waiting for it to break again. Lance Salazar lived in that loop.
He describes a defeatist stretch where even when things were okay, he was just wondering when it was going to go bad.
So he and his wife stopped fixing and started designing, borrowing the thing they already knew how to do in business: decide what you want, build a plan, commit to it, track it.
What came out of that is a framework they call the four legendary relationship elements. You. The partnership. The friendship. The lovers. And Lance is insistent about the order, because a great partnership needs a great partner first, and it is very hard to feel like friends with someone you are arguing with about the garbage.
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Legendary Couples with Kids: https://frontrowdads.com/39
Jon's eleven-year-old had been more anxious than usual, and his wife told him why.
You have been more stressed at work. He is a reflector. He picks up on your energy.
Bryan Post takes that and does something more useful than reassurance. Your son has his own part, formed long before this week. You have yours. And the moment you take his behavior personally, you lose the ability to be present for him, because you have made his stuff your stuff. He gives the actual words to use, and the reason they work: all behavior arises from stress; a stressed child regresses to a younger age, and between the stress and the behavior there is only ever love or fear.
Then the part most parents get backward. When your kid's fear frightens you, what you do next is control, suppress, and correct, and you tell yourself that is good parenting. It isn't.
He finishes with the child who goes quiet instead of acting out, what happens when you try to pry that child open, and the one thing that works instead.
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This is a short cut from one of the best conversations on this feed. The whole thing is worth your time: Love-Based Parenting Is Firm, Honest, and Harder Than Yelling Ever Was — https://frontrowdads.com/531
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
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