Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
063: What Scoreboard are You Looking at?
We’re all playing a game.
👉 Maybe it’s the finance game.
👉 Maybe it’s the “I’m right, you’re wrong” game.
👉 Maybe it’s the happiness game – If I’m happy and feeling good, I’m winning.
But none of those games are the competition that really matters.
What really matters is the relationship game.
If your marriage isn’t great, if your kids don’t want to be around you, it doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank.
The problem is, a lot of men don’t know how to win at the relationship game.
We learned the rules of the finance game when we were kids. But relationships? How to build trust, see the best in our kids, lift up our wife? No one taught us. Plus, it’s tougher to quantify.
Well we get to decide what success means.
Listen to today’s episode and start quantifying, tracking, and winning at the game that really matters.
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is gonna give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode number 63. Feel like I'm cruisin'. Right now it's a Friday. It's been an awesome week Productive, exciting, fun. I am solo dadding. Brenda's going camping tonight by herself, so she's doing that. I'm with the girls and right now I'm recording this podcast for you.
Speaker 1:So what scoreboard are you looking at? That's the title of this episode, and first I want to talk about winning, this innate competitive nature that a lot of men have, and ranking themselves as winning or losing, and not wanting to lose and wanting to win, and a lot of the time, what we'll do is we'll look around us externally to decide if we're winning or losing. So maybe you notice what other people are wearing, the types of clothes people have, or you're sitting in the school line waiting to pick up your kid and you look at all the cars that people have and you look at what car you have versus what car they have. One of my buddies that I was talking to he's got this 30 year old pop-up camper and when he pulls up to a campsite and he's hanging out with all of his friends, they all have these new hard sided campers and it's hard not to pin yourself against them. And it's hard not to pin yourself against them. But the problem with using these things as your scoreboard is that you start to have negative self-talk. You start to beat yourself up, telling yourself that you aren't doing enough, you're not providing enough, you're not making enough money, you're not working hard enough. All those negative self-talks that don't feel good aren't helpful when we're moving through our day-to-day. So we're playing the wrong game. We're looking at the wrong scoreboard, effort to win, but it's not a finance game. All those examples I gave.
Speaker 1:At the core is a finance scoreboard. It's also not a game of being right. Any relationship you're in, when you're talking to someone or having a disagreement, the game is not right or wrong and it's also not a feel-good game. The goal isn't happiness. We don't want to have the scoreboard be am I happy or am I sad? And if I'm sad or disappointed, then something's wrong and I'm losing. It's not the game either. So what game is it? It's a relationship game. That's what we're going to talk about today. There's also probably a health game that we want to win so we can grow old and we can play with our grandkids.
Speaker 1:But in this episode I'm going to talk about the relationship game. And the reason we want to play the relationship game is because it doesn't matter how well we're doing at the finance game. If your relationships suck, if you don't have a good marriage, if you are destroying the relationship with your kids, the financial game doesn't matter. The relationship game is the one we want to be playing, because relationships bring us the vitality. They bring us the love, the joy that makes life worth living. That's what life's about. If you ask anybody that's 70 or older what's the most important thing in life, they're going to say their relationships, and I talk about it on this podcast a lot. There's that one study. I'm not going to reference it exactly right now, but it's one of the longest studies that have ever been conducted and it followed people throughout their life and the ones that were most fulfilled were the ones that had tight relationships later in life.
Speaker 1:So to play the relationship game, we got to start understanding the rules and understanding the scoreboard, and this is tricky because it's not as tangible as the finance game and the finance game we've been playing for a long time, since we were kids. We understand the finance game rules and the relationship rules and the relationship rules. As men we don't really know what the heck the rules are, and to keep score in the relationship game is kind of tough. You're not in charge of what other people think of you. You don't know always how much people love you or respect you, so we are the ones that get to decide how to measure success. Then, if we're going to play the relationship game, if you're on board, we get to decide how we're going to measure success.
Speaker 1:And I want to give you a few ideas to start quantifying so you can know that you're winning in the relationship game. The first one is quality time with your family. This is something you can actually make tangible track. How much one-on-one time are you spending with each member of your family? How many family game nights are you doing, or time outside together or date nights? You can set a goal and keep track and you don't have to look at your bank account to see if you're winning the game. You can look at your calendar or a checklist to see if you're winning at the relationship game.
Speaker 1:Another one is giving genuine compliments and encouragement. How are you lifting people up in your life? Not the flat, insincere compliments, but when you really encourage someone, compliment them from a place of love. That means that you're looking at the good in somebody else your wife, your kids, the people you lead at work. That's another way. And if you want to quantify it, make a checkmark how many people did I give a compliment to? How many people did I encourage today? Make a checkmark on your calendar or something like that.
Speaker 1:Another is gratitude. A lot of people talk about keeping a gratitude journal and thinking about the things we're thankful for. But for a relationship scoreboard, we can write down a gratitude journal of our relationships. Which relationships are we thankful for? It could be the relationship with the checkout lady that we see at the grocery store. There's one at our grocery store named Cindy, and sometimes I stop and get a coffee at 7.30 in the morning and she's always there early and we always have this exchange and she smiles. I don't think she knows my name, but we have that familiar relationship and'm thankful for that. Like that makes life more fulfilling for me and I can keep that as a scoreboard.
Speaker 1:Another idea is some type of reflection. Maybe at the end of the week or at the end of the day, what's the best conversation I had? Who did I appreciate the most today? Some type of reflection on the relationships that you have. It's going to bring more awareness to your relationships and you can start tracking, rating yourself, winning the relationship game that way. So it's quality time that you've spent with your family. It's the number of genuine compliments, encouragement, that you're giving out. It's gratitude for the relationships that you currently have and it's a reflection of the relationships that you currently have and the wins that you've had in relationships.
Speaker 1:Now the last two the gratitude, the reflection. You got to write those down and sometimes dudes don't like to write in a journal, but I'm guessing that you have a journal somewhere that someone gave you at some point or you bought, planning on using it, planning on journaling, and it got stuffed in a drawer or it's up on a shelf and I would say grab that journal and start writing in it. Gratitude, reflection you could even count writing in a journal every day, whatever the hell you want to write as a win to build your relationships, because if you start writing in a journal, you're going to start learning more about yourself. You're going to start managing your mindset, what you can control, and that's going to benefit your relationships. So stop rating yourself on your to-do list or the amount of money that you have in the bank. It's not the material possessions you own. Those are awesome, they're good to have, but if we use that as a scoreboard, we're never going to feel really fulfilled. We're going to compare to other people and there's never going to be enough.
Speaker 1:One of the guys that I coach I've known him for a while, a friend. We were on a call the other night and we were talking about this subject and where we compare and see that we have negative self-talk with ourself. And we were talking about this subject and where we compare and see that we have negative self-talk with ourself. And he was talking about one of his kid's friend's houses and that this house is just beautiful, it's huge, and he was comparing his house to this friend's house and just the negative self-talk that could come with that. What does my kid think about what we have? I wish I could give my kid more. I'm not giving him enough.
Speaker 1:He noticed that self-talk and when he picked him up from this house, when he brought him home, he changed the game and started to play the relationship game. And he didn't really call it that, but he did. He just asked his son hey, do you want to play some video games together? They were into some specific game I'm not a gamer, I don't know what it was called and they sat and they played a game together. They had quality dad time. And when he did that, when he leaned into his relationship with his son instead of using a scoreboard of the size and quality of the house, he started thinking of himself differently. He started remembering oh, this is what it's about, this is what it means to be a good dad. That kind of self-talk feels a lot better and that kind of self-talk is going to motivate us to continue to focus on the relationship game the game that's really important instead of the finance stuff the finance stuff will work itself out. The relationship game the game that's really important instead of the finance stuff the finance stuff will work itself out. The relationship game, the one that we don't really know the rules to yet, that's the one we want to start working on. All right, that's what I got for you guys today.
Speaker 1:If you guys have not rated the podcast or followed it. Please, please, do. I'd appreciate it. It helps more men find the podcast. So rate us on Apple. Give us a review, if you could do that. Thank you very much and have an awesome week.
