How Learning to Soothe His Newborn Daughter Shaped Peter Varberg's Coaching

DescriptionToday I’m joined by Peter Varberg. He grew up a missionary kid in Tacloban, Philippines — the kind of upbringing where his dad’s name opened doors before he ever said a word himself, and being blonde and blue-eyed in a country where that stood out meant he never really got to be anonymous. He studied film almost by accident, won “Film of the Year” as a freshman with a borrowed camera, and eventually found his way into sales and coaching.We talk about the real difference between managing people and leading them, what nearly two decades of missionary-family duty taught him about doing work , and how becoming a father less than a year into marriage cracked open everything he thought he understood about provision. We talk about how knowing when to pause something is important and that most of what shapes us doesn’t look like a plan while we’re living it — usually you only see the hand that was guiding you once you look back.If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more like this, please consider subscribing. This is a passion project for me and the more I can fund this, the more time I can invest in it.Lessons from Peter1. Coaching and therapy solve different problems, and knowing the line matters. Peter went through ICF (International Coaching Federation) training that drew a clear distinction: therapy looks backward, processing where a pattern started and unlearning it; coaching looks forward, setting goals and taking action. He’s upfront that the line gets blurry in practice, and that part of coaching well is knowing when to point someone toward a therapist instead of trying to be one. (13:00–15:00)2. Growing up in a “fishbowl” taught him to carry expectations before he ever chose his own. As a missionary kid in Tacloban, Peter couldn’t go anywhere without people already knowing his father — a six-foot-three American pastor who spoke five languages and knew everybody in the city. That visibility came with a quiet pressure: his actions reflected on his parents’ reputation, and he absorbed a heightened sense of duty and responsibility long before he understood he was absorbing it. All three siblings, he notes, ended up in therapy working through some version of the same thing — a reminder that even a genuinely good upbringing can wire in patterns worth examining as an adult. (18:00–21:00)3. “Nobody ends up doing what they studied” — so he picked his major out of curiosity, not certainty. As kids, Peter’s dad walked him and his brother around Tacloban to interview successful people in different fields about how they’d chosen their careers — his own version of a podcast, years before podcasts existed. The lesson Peter actually walked away with was almost a joke: since so few people end up in the field they studied, he decided to study what was simply interesting to him. That’s how a video-editing hobby became a double major in graphic design and film. (27:00–30:00)4. He built his early film career on effort, not innate talent. As a freshman intro-to-film student, Peter borrowed a friend’s Canon 5D Mark II — brand new technology at the time — while everyone else was still shooting on mini-DV tape. The film wasn’t exceptional, he admits, but it looked like a movie next to everyone else’s student work, and he won Film of the Year as a freshman. From there he went all-in: building his own camera dollies out of PVC pipe and skateboard wheels, welding jibs with a friend, chasing every new technique he could find on YouTube. (36:00–40:00)5. His daughter’s inability to self-soothe became his sharpest leadership lesson yet. Peter went down a rabbit hole on “assisted naps” and newborn brain development — kids under a certain age physically cannot calm themselves down, so a crying baby isn’t being difficult, it’s in genuine fight-or-flight. That reframe from “why won’t you just settle” to “this is medically incapable of self-soothing yet” produced compassion instead of frustration. He maps the same insight directly onto coaching: leaders who are “unconsciously competent” at their own jobs often can’t see that a new hire’s mistakes aren’t laziness — it’s literally their first time doing this. (52:00–58:00)6. “Work is not the enemy” — and he wants to build something around that conviction. Peter is sitting on one recorded episode of a podcast he hasn’t finished launching, built around the idea (inspired by Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor) that culture treats work as something to escape rather than as part of our design. Coming from a family of missionaries on both sides, he’s wrestled directly with the sacred-versus-secular question — pastor or missionary vs. a “regular” job — and landed on the conviction that work itself is good, not a necessary evil to be minimized. (58:00–1:03:00)7. Pausing a good idea can be the healthiest decision, not a failure of nerve. One of Peter’s own coaches pushed him to book a recording date for his podcast on the spot — and he did, and it worked. But he’s just as quick to push back on hustle-culture coaching that treats every unfulfilled dream as fear in disguise. His actual framework: look honestly at your current capacity and priorities, and if there’s nothing left to give something, pausing it is a healthy call — not a leap of faith you’re too scared to take. (58:00–1:03:00)8. Marriage and a baby eight months later pushed him into a season of “I don’t have enough” — until it wasn’t.Peter got married about a year and a half before this conversation, then found out they were expecting just eight months in. He describes months of feeling like he lacked the capacity, in his own strength, to meet the need he thought he needed to meet — a kind of slow-motion Gideon story. Once the baby arrived, he could finally see that the provision he needed had been there all along; he just couldn’t access it by force of will. (1:05:00–1:08:00)9. You can only see God’s faithfulness by looking backward, never forward. Closing the conversation, Peter lands on the image of rowing a boat — facing backward toward where you’ve been, with no way to see what’s ahead. He connects it to “your word is a lamp unto my feet”: in the ancient world, a lamp only lit the very next step, not the whole road. The takeaway isn’t to demand more clarity before moving — it’s to trust that the next step is the only one you’re owed right now. (1:10:00–1:12:00) Get full access to Matt Heisler at mattheisler.substack.com/subscribe