This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. Alright, what's up? Episode number 51. What is new? I've been trying to have something in my back pocket and answer to this question. Besides, not much same old, same old. So if I ran into you today and you were like, hey, tommy, what's new?
Speaker 1:
I would tell you that we no longer have furniture in our living room, and this is something that Brenda's been talking about for five years or so, and she's reading Peter Atia's new book Outlive. So her inspiration to move all the furniture out of our living room has been reignited, with the goal to inspire more movement, get away from the sedentary living room. And the long term play here is that our hip mobility, our ability to stand and lay down on the ground, really declines as we get older, and this is inspiring us to stay more mobile, more agile. Which is interesting that I just use the word agile, because agile is part of the topic for today's podcast. So I won't talk about the living room anymore. I will talk about becoming emotionally agile. So not physically agile, but emotionally agile, and I just taught this to a group of entrepreneurs mastermind that I'm in. I taught this concept and I think it's something that applies to dads. So today we're going to talk about emotional agility, we're going to define what it is and I'm going to give you three tactics to help you become more emotionally agile. So when I think of agile, I kind of picture myself on one side of a river and there's a bunch of river stones, without stopping but not going too fast, and fluidly moving over the stones to the other side of the river. Or football practice and there are the big tires out there and you have to go high knees through the tires. You want to be soft on your toes and you want to move fluidly throughout that drill. That's what I think of when I think of agile.
Speaker 1:
So emotional agility is being able to flow through different emotions. Emotions are energy in motion. E motion, energy in motion. So we want to keep that energy flowing and moving. That's what emotional agility is. And the opposite of emotional agility is emotional rigidity. I heard Susan David frame it up this way. She's a psychologist and writes about emotional agility. So emotional rigidity is when we experience an emotion, something happens in the world and we experience an emotion and we stiffen up against it. We think we shouldn't be feeling that way and the emotion, the energy of that emotion, gets stuck and this has an effect. It has an effect on our productivity, on our stress, on the success or the failures that we have in life. So we want to keep the emotions flowing when we're rigid to them.
Speaker 1:
Dr Joe Dispenza talks about how stuck emotions can over time become our moods and if we stay in those moods after a few days or weeks it becomes our temperament. And if we stay in that temperament for a couple months it becomes our personality and we can change that. We can change our temperament, our moods, our personality and it starts by getting those stuck emotions unstuck. And I like how Dr Joe Dispenza talks about it. I think of an example, as something triggers us at work and it's something that we're pissed off about, or maybe it's a disappointment that happens at work and then our mood Later that day is irritated and maybe we hold on to that irritation for a couple days, and then our temperament becomes grumbling around the house and we're short-tempered or we're not present, and that temperament sticks around for a couple weeks, a couple months and the personality starts to take shape and we become a grouch. We become that grumpy dad that isn't fun, that isn't having excitement in his life anymore. And this happens because we stay rigid to our emotions. We fight them instead of allowing them and being agile with them. So shit's gonna happen in life. We're gonna have something at work that triggers us or something at home that triggers us. We might slip into a rut, but if we're emotionally agile, we can get out of those ruts quickly. We're gonna feel frustrated, disappointed, guilty. We can feel those uncomfortable emotions and be agile enough to stay present and not react quickly and move back into more of a flow and more of a upbeat emotion. So emotional agility isn't about not feeling negative emotions. It's about becoming aware of all of your emotions and opening up to them. To become more emotionally agile, you need to get really good at feeling and we'll hear this message a lot that you have to feel your feelings.
Speaker 1:
I didn't know what that meant for most of my life. What does it mean to feel? The first time I really started to understand this was at a meditation retreat that I went to, and it was seven years ago it was in Colorado, kind of in the middle of nowhere, and Brent and I arrived, we got into the room and this teacher was there. He was kind of a no BS meditation teacher. We sat down, he introduced himself for a couple minutes and then he said, okay, let's meditate. And we sat there and he guided us. He turned our awareness away from our brain and into our body and I remember slowly my mind quieting down and feeling something. There was a stretching across my chest and I had never felt that before. I was sitting there. I wasn't moving in my chair, I was physically still, but something had moved and the longer I sat there and the longer he pointed our attention to our body, other movement started showing up, other energy, other sensations and it was a whole bunch of stuff and I was sitting there thinking like is this real or am I just making it up? It is real, it's not made up. We have energy moving through our body and we're not aware of it and it's happening all the time, every day, and I hadn't noticed it until then. And we weren't talking about emotions that weekend. We weren't naming things like happy, sad, angry, disappointed, scared. We weren't naming emotions, we were just experiencing the energetic sensations that were present in the body and it's those sensations that can keep us stuck, that we can get rigid to, and they make us procrastinate and they make us angry really quickly and it keeps us spinning out. So tuning in to those emotions is going to allow us to become more emotionally agile and you don't have to go to a meditation retreat to notice this, to pick up this skill of feeling.
Speaker 1:
The guys that I work with will be in one of our first sessions and let's say we're talking about making a career change and the guy says I don't know what to do next. And I'll say, okay, when you think I don't know what to do next, how do you feel? And he'll say something like I feel like there are so many options and I can't choose. He'll give me another thought. He won't tell me how he's feeling and by the fourth session, let's just say it's the same thought I don't know what to do next. And we pause and I ask him how does it make you feel when you think I don't know what to do next? And he'll feel a pit in his stomach or he'll feel restless or tension in his shoulders or in his limbs.
Speaker 1:
It doesn't take much work to start to learn how to feel, how to start to build this skill, and the most successful leaders are emotionally agile. Something crappy happens and two minutes later they're back and they're in a productive state. The dads that are emotionally agile they can be there for their kids. When their kids aren't able to handle their emotions and, let's say, they're having a tantrum or they're having a really hard time in high school with some social stuff going on An emotionally agile dad is able to be there for them. So the secret to becoming emotionally agile is to become aware of what the heck we're feeling and three ways to do that.
Speaker 1:
I'm going to give you three tactics to try out to start to feel, because feeling is a skill and, just like any other skill, you want to learn. You start small and you keep getting reps. You keep getting reps. The first time you try to feel, you might not feel anything. That's fine. That's where most guys start. So to start getting your reps, you can go on to Google and search two minute body scan and whatever video pops up, try it. If you're already meditating and you're familiar with a somatic body scan type in 10 minute body scan and try it. Get some more reps in.
Speaker 1:
There's also this app called how we Feel and it's a really good tool to build your emotional agility. If you look it up in the app store, it's a heart with different colors. And do it for a few days. Don't go all out. Don't tell yourself that I'm going to check in with this app for the next month. Just try it for a few days. Click through it. They have some really cool short videos that explain the science behind this stuff, behind emotional agility and our emotions and this energy inside of us.
Speaker 1:
And the third option is to set up a strategy call Like go to thedurabledadcom, set up a call with me. You answer a couple of questions and in one of the questions, just write her podcast episode number 51, and want to understand what the heck feeling is, want to get some reps in and understand. That's what those strategy calls are there for. They're to take whatever you're hearing, learning on this podcast, and taking it to the next level, taking it to the next step. So we want to become more emotionally agile. We don't want to get stuck and rigid in our emotions and we want to flow through them better. And three things to try out are body scan, meditations, the how we feel app or setting up a strategy call. That's what I got for you guys today. Thank you for listening. I love recording these podcasts and I know you're out there listening, so thank you, appreciate that. Hope you have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.