donald-campbell

Back to Work

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:12:17 GMT

Time to dig in.

One of the most challenging things about stepping away from my work is getting back into it. When momentum is built, pausing can feel counterintuitive. People might forget about you for a bit. Your energy on reentry is different than it was when you stopped.

And that’s the point of the pause—to shift the energy. Ideally, to gain new energy. Fresh energy.

Even so, reentry requires a reorientation.

Over the years, I’ve noticed this is often why people don’t stop. It isn’t the healthiest approach, but it is the logic behind it. I once knew an educator who struggled deeply with the idea of retirement because he believed that if he wasn’t working every day, he would die. There was no work-from-home option. No part-time role. His worldview demanded full-time work as a condition for survival.

For me, that’s a tough way to live.

And yet, I get it.

After several weeks away from researching and writing—and from engaging and responding—I found myself needing more time than expected to crank the engine and let it warm up. I didn’t anticipate that.

Still, I know this to be true:

I wouldn’t change a thing.

I took time to stop.

It was reflective.

Quiet.

Restorative.

Educational.

It was somewhat unplanned.

My nervous system made the decision before my mind caught up. It was time.

Now that I’m back, restoration is serving me well.

I have fresh eyes for what’s happening and what requires my attention.

I have renewed energy to execute both short- and long-term strategies for my work.

My instincts are sharper, helping me assess and analyze the world—and my place in it—with greater clarity.

All of this makes me better for myself and for others.

In the effort to do things well—and to do good things—stopping matters.

Now that I’m back, it’s time to move forward with intention. To push the envelope, thoughtfully.

There’s much to do. As one of my favorite supervisors used to say, “ We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us .”

Time to get to work.

They're Not Broken

don@soulfireparenting.com (Donald Campbell) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 22:55:38 GMT

A Graceful Perspective from the Heart.

Getting away from the house for a few days always feels good. It’s usually about breaking the routine. My wife and I spend a lot of time focused on the kids and work. We do not get a lot of quiet time together and we do not spend a lot of time with our extended family. That’s true for several reasons.

The last few years have been tough, and the distance has taken a toll. Still, if we’re honest, we like to pause every now and then to just be in a quiet space where we do not have to explain ourselves to everyone, or solve problems all day, or stay active until the sun (and the kids) are down for the day… and we have no energy left. When possible, we accomplish it in a very simple way:

We leave town without them.

We are blessed to have my mom and stepdad who are willing to be there on the rare occasions when we do take extended weekends. The kids are all old enough to be OK with not seeing us for a few days, though our youngest makes it clear that he doesn’t love that we leave him behind. Now in third grade and recently diagnosed with combined ADHD, it makes him uncomfortable to see us go. This time around, we were able to make a deal that worked for everybody. We’d enjoy a weekend of sun and sand, and he’d get real seashells when we returned. Done.

Among the things we have come to savor about the brief jaunts to our favorite beach town is the time we spend walking along the beach just before we leave. We leave our hotel room in the morning just before sunrise, walk the length of the strip toward the boardwalk, and time our arrival on the sand so that we get to observe the beautiful eastern sky as it becomes awash in the majestic, stirring reddish orange of the early morning sun. With some chop in the water on this particular morning, the dolphins came out to put on a show they must have known we would enjoy. As the sun rises and waves crash, the wind and sand and smell of salty sea air remind us of the importance of taking time to breathe and enjoy each other… and these peaceful restorative moments.

Despite that, I still walked away disappointed.

For you see, my wife and I made this promise to our youngest that we would bring him those real seashells. On this morning, our search for seashells did not yield much. We looked for a while and the options were very, very limited. We pocketed halves of some shells, fragments of others. We were disappointed, perhaps even on his behalf. We took what we could and returned to our hotel, had breakfast and began the drive home. It was hard not to feel disheartened because it seemed like a fairly reasonable request to honor. Bring shells back from the beach. Oh, well.

When we arrived home, everything was as we expected it to be. The kids were good, the house was in one piece (as were Grandma and Grandpa) and there were no visible scars. Good enough for this weekend. We took a few minutes to get unpacked and settled and my wife got a head start on giving little knickknacks to the kids. I was not in the living room when my wife presented our meager haul to our youngest son. He did not seem from a distance to have been as disappointed as we were, which I thought was cool, if somewhat surprising. A few minutes later, when I walked into the room, he was at a table exploring the shells. I sat at the chair near the table and he called my attention to the shells. I lamented that what he had was the best we could do this time. Try as we did, all the beach was willing to offer us was a few broken shells.

It was at this moment that my eight-year-old, neurodivergent third grader, dropped a most unexpected gem:

“They’re not broken. They’re perfect. Unique.”

Looking to my right, I sat for a moment with the reality that I had sourced the wisdom of an old man directly from my youngest child. Why was I so hard on myself for not producing perfect, unbroken shells? Why did it make me so uncomfortable to be as satisfied with these as he turned out to be?

If I am honest, it was all about me. I should never have expected him to explode. Such an expectation really fails to give him credit for being the good guy he is. This was about my feeling that I had failed to do my best for him. Think about that. Seashells triggered a sense of inadequacy in me. How real is that? A great trip from start to finish ended with me wishing I had found more suitable shells on the beach, and I brought them home to a son who was quick to correct my interpretation of them being broken at all.

You may have experienced a similar moment that humbled you. My hope is that yours left you with a humble smile, if not a grateful tear, in the realization that there is power (and even great beauty) in our imperfection. Mine left me with both. I actually began typing this a little more than three months ago just after we returned from our trip. Life happened, and it kept happening and… well, here it is, three months later.

My wish for you is that it not only leaves you confident in your own imperfection as a parent or friend, partner or leader; it leaves you encouraged and edified – celebrating your unique awesomeness. There are so many things every day that test our resilience, our ability to endure. So many moments we reflect on wondering, “Did I get that one right?” Some answers come immediately. Others take years. Many fall somewhere in between. Either way, know that in the often-intense uncertainty of parenting, your willingness to be the most authentic, intentional parent you can be, will define you more than anything else. Go ahead. Let them see you in your perfect uniqueness. You got this.

The Assignment

don@soulfireparenting.com (Donald Campbell) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:32:25 GMT

How it All Started.

I had been an educator for about 19 years and a performance coach for about 12 years. And when parent coaching first landed on my radar, I had been a parent for about eight years. I honestly didn’t even know such a thing existed. Of course, by the time I found out, my initial reaction was one of disappointment. “Why couldn’t I find out about this sooner,” I thought to myself. “I definitely could’ve used one myself.”

It was a little after 9:30am on a beautiful morning in early May, 2017. I had just dropped my kids off and returned to the house. I was enjoying some extended time away from the strictures of work and just focusing on the family. I sat down to eat breakfast and turned on the TV. The local news channel was on and they were doing a profile of an organization not far from me with a program that focused on supporting fathers seeking to strengthen their relationships with their kids. Once I was done thinking about how I wished I had known about them sooner, my next thought was, “That’s very cool. I wouldn’t mind doing work like that one day.”

There are people who will tell you that you can speak things into existence. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it done, too. This was different – it was just a thought. I didn’t open my mouth one time. And yet…

A few weeks later, I was waiting for my vehicle at the dealership where a recall repair was being completed. I brought my laptop, knowing it would be a little while. I started to use the time to search an online database for available positions for a friend who was job hunting. Out of curiosity, I entered my old title, and the strangest thing happened. A position popped up at the organization that the news station had profiled weeks earlier. I made it about four bullets down the screen when I had the strangest sense of energy around me. It became apparent that this would be my next job. Wasn’t looking for it, wasn’t pursuing it, wasn’t even hoping for it – but there it was. My next job.

All the stars aligned, and I began this new position supporting fathers in August of 2017. I was not a perfect father, my pathway to parenthood was not perfect, and I had more questions about being a dad than I had answers. Still, sure enough, I was a resource for dads who want to be closer to their kids. And I have never enjoyed work more than I enjoy what I do right now.

I have now been an educator for 26 years and a performance coach for 19. I have three beautiful children – one in high school, one in middle school, and one in elementary school – and I still learn more about them and my role in their life each day. They teach me well. They make me better at what I do. I shifted from coaching through a corporate performance lens to supporting the unique needs of parents exclusively. In the years since I started coaching parents, I have worked with hundreds of moms and dads who deeply wish to see their parenting experience evolve, just like I did. This work, my practice, it chose me. No part of anything I have ever done would have convinced me that I would do this professionally in this lifetime. But I know this: I am a better person for it. And I hope I am as good a steward of its potential for others as it has been an agent of powerful transformation for me.

In this space, I look forward to sharing more about my travels through the parenting realm. I encourage you to laugh with me, learn from my foibles, perhaps experience introspection and a measure of humility from some of my own moments. It is in this collection of thoughts and through my practice as a parenting coach that I hope to give back, to engage with the world around me, and make homes, lives and humans a little better… one assignment at a time.

So Many Ways to Screw Up

don@soulfireparenting.com (Donald Campbell) — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 05:43:39 GMT

Learning to appreciate the art of repair.

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The day didn’t need to look the way it already had. Now, it was time to pick up my youngest son. The productive part of my day was over. That fact alone was bad enough. I didn’t realize, though, that the destructive part was about to begin.

After I scooped up my first grader, we came straight home. His brother, with whom he shares a room, was in the shower. When my little guy asked if he could watch TV, I said yes; figuring that I could use that time to get a few more things done. Neat plan so far.

When his brother came out of the shower four minutes later, he dispatched his little brother out of the room so he could get dressed. Annoyed, my first grader came into the living room and threw a tantrum about his TV time being interrupted. The beginning of the end.

Sensing my anger level increase, I calmly advised him to be patient and let his brother finish getting dressed. He continued to complain.

I thought this would be an ideal time to say, “Ok, how about this: how about you’ve just lost your TV time for the day? No TV time this afternoon, since it’s such a big deal for you that your brother can’t even get dressed.”

Commence the meltdown.

If I wasn’t already reaching my capacity to cope, this surely was enough to hit the cap. Always an overachiever, I blew right past it.

I launched up from the accent chair and literally marched my first grader down the hall. Already crying from his meltdown, I sprayed kerosene all over the situation by making him walk down the hall with me behind him – hands on his shoulders the whole time – until we reached my bedroom door. Once we entered my room, I picked him up, placed him on my bed, got down on my knees to speak to him at eye level, and sternly admonished him for his meltdown and for not allowing his brother time to get dressed.

Then, I looked at my first grader. He was terrified. I had never once before seen such a look of abject fear on his face… and I had put it there. This isn’t the Daddy he knows. To him, this guy’s a monster. I thought, “Man – I am NAILING this dad thing today!” A profile in parenting perfection. Yeah.

As I watched tears the size of hubcaps falling my little guy’s eyes, two things became abundantly clear: first, my meltdown was worst than his. The second: I had to fix it. After three kids and a parenting journey that had begun over 13 years earlier, this would be the first time I would be doing something like this.

I apologized. I found words. They were easy, delivered with warmth and humility, and sought more than anything to honor the fact that he didn’t like me very much at that moment. And with good reason – I took my frustrations from the day out on him. I broke my little guy’s heart, and he deserved better than that.

Still, he was willing to hear what I was saying, and in the end, he decided to take the leap of faith required for him to accept my apology. I did not take that lightly.

I was reminded of a few things that afternoon. One was that there are so many extraordinary ways to screw up as a parent. Another is that being a parenting professional does not preclude one from finding new and exciting ways to crash and burn as a parent. The biggest, though, was probably the importance of the art of repair. Doesn’t matter what the circumstance – the art of repair is a critical component in any meaningful relationship. We do well to look at the art of repair not as something to be feared or loathed, but something to be embraced and appreciated. It is a process that honors truths and makes care and concern visible.

As much as my first grader might remember what I did to make him cry, he also remembers what I did afterward. No storm off, no lecture, no “think about what you did wrong” – an honest reflection on how I could have done that moment better. He appreciated it.

Not perfect, just parenting.