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
064: Practice vs. Game Time
If life is a game, how do you want to perform?
And like any game, we gotta practice.
We can’t expect to play at a high level if we don’t put in the work outside of game time.
And it doesn’t take much.
Here are the top 3 drills you can run that’ll allow you to win in the game of life:
☝️ BREATH WORK. It’s a quick hack to lower the intensity of your emotions.
✌️ WATCH YOUR GAME FILM. Reflect on how you want to perform differently next time.
🤟 GET A COACH. Put in one hour each week to strategize, address issues, and implement tools, and you perform better in every area of life.
Tune in to start putting in the work so you can level up your performance as a dad, husband, leader, peewee baseball coach, financial provider, whatever role you play.
Box breathing:
https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-box-breathing
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 64.
Speaker 1:I just got back from being outside throwing some spears. I am training for a Spartan race. So a Spartan race is an obstacle course race and one of the main obstacles the signature of a Spartan race is throwing spears. So my buddy made some spears and he's got an archery target that I'm borrowing and I throw spears and it looks a lot easier than it is. So I do practice for it, because in the race when you get to the obstacle to throw the spear, you hit the target. You get to keep running, you miss the target. You got to do 30 burpees, you got to do 30 burpees. And when you're 10 miles into a race and you have to throw a spear and you want to hit the target, the practice before doing it makes a big difference. Because first race I ever did missed had to do 30 burpees. Since then I've nailed it because I practiced and it's a phenomenal feeling to not have to do 30 burpees. So that's where I just got back from, and it kind of ties into what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about practice versus game time. In last week's episode I talked about scoreboard and we're going to go with this premise that life is a game, and you don't have to listen to last week's episode to get something out of what I'm going to talk about today. But we're starting with life is a game and with any game, if you want to be great, if you want to succeed, you got to practice, and we know this with sports. We've heard all the stories about the amazing athletes that go to team practice and then afterwards they stay to practice for another hour individually. Or the musicians that have such a strong practice regimen to perform at the highest levels. And as dads, do we practice? Do we know what practice even looks like? So the question that we're going to look at is how do we practice for this game of life? As a dad, as a husband, as a business leader, as a coach for his kids' games, whatever all these different roles we play, how do we practice for them? And the first thing I'm going to do is define game time and then we're going to talk about practice.
Speaker 1:So game time I kind of think of it as the things we don't control. So right now it's the end of the school year, there are concerts, there's field days, there's parties, all this extra stuff on top of our normal baseball, soccer, normal activities that our kids have. So this is game time, right, there's going to be more to plan, there's going to be more logistics, there's going to be more running around. How do you want to perform? How do you want to show up? Another example of game time are family trips. When you're on a family trip, it's pretty much game time the entire time. And then you also got to be ready for the unexpected delayed flights, missing baggages, the wrong room that was booked. How do you want to show up during that game?
Speaker 1:One of the dads I'm coaching he was getting back from a work trip and he was exhausted and our call happened to be an hour before he got home and all he wanted to do was chill. But he knew when he got home at five o'clock it was going to be game time, it was going to be time to be a dad, time to be a husband, until nine o'clock when the kids got down. So how does he want to be when he's tired, when he's exhausted, but he still has to show up to be a dad from five to nine. Another dad he owns his own business and his CFO was doing some sketchy stuff and it came to light. And now he is going to have to show up for meetings, for conversations right, that's game time. That's the game of life. How does he want to perform? How does he want to act, behave during that game? So those are examples of game time. They're situations that we don't have control over and what we can control is how we perform.
Speaker 1:So, in the game of life as a man, how do we want to play, how do we want to perform? And I think some of the ways we want to perform are calm. We want to be level-headed, we want to be flexible, be able to roll with unexpected things that come our way. We don't want to check out, we want to be engaged. Right, that dad that was exhausted and getting home from a work trip, he was tired, he could have just checked out, but that's not how we wanted to play. He wanted to be engaged, he wanted to be helpful, be present. That's another one. We want to be present, we want to be relaxed, we want to carry things lightly, with a little bit of a sense of humor, not take things too seriously. These are the ways we want to perform right. We don't want to be overthinking all the time. We want to be decisive as a man and play the game in a very confident way.
Speaker 1:And what we don't want is to be jittery and worked up and agitated and stressed, and you know when you're in that state you can feel when you haven't been practicing and you are agitated. Your energy is just high and intense and usually we don't perform well in the game of life when we're high and intense. So what does practice look like for life? Game time is out of our control, but there are drills that we can do in a controlled environment that are going to let us prepare for game time. So I'm going to give you the top three drills. The first one is breath work.
Speaker 1:And if I say breath work and you're like what the hell is he talking about? Or you roll your eyes because you're like I don't want to just practice my breathing, focusing on your breath and learning how to work with your breath allows us to control our emotional state. Our breath is an indicator of how we're feeling and how calm we are. So when you're pissed off, if you notice your breath, it's going to be short, it's going to be fast, it's going to be up in your upper chest and in your throat and, conversely, when you're calm and relaxed, your breath is going to be slower, going to be longer, steadier, it's going to come down into your solar plexus, maybe even your stomach. So learning how to control your breath is a quick hack to keep a clear head and perform better in a game.
Speaker 1:One exercise that I do a lot with guys is box breathing, and this is an exercise that Navy SEALs do, and I'll link to a description of what box breathing is. But it's a really simple technique. So learning to control your breath, clearing your head to thinking more clearly in the moment when the whistle blows and you're in game time, you want to have the lowest heartbeat in the room. Working on breath, work during practice times, is going to help you perform better as the person that can manage whatever chaos comes his way. That's the first drill. Second drill watching game film.
Speaker 1:This is all about taking a look at how you performed and saying watching game film, because when I was in college, we would watch a VHS tape of our past game and we would analyze it. I'm sure now it's not on film. I don't know if athletes call it something else besides game film, but that's what I'm rolling with and it makes me feel a little old. If you listen to episode number 18, upgrade your reactions. I dive into this a little bit more, but basically what you're going to do to watch game film is you pick an argument you got into or an email that pissed you off over the last week or any event that didn't go the way you wanted, and you recap it in your mind and then you ask yourself what were you trying to control that you couldn't and what could you have done differently? Those two simple questions. When you're reflecting, the next time you're in a similar game situation, you're going to have one awareness of what you can control and what you can't. And two, you would have already thought about how you want to show up, how you want to perform, and you can watch game film of the good stuff too. Look at a dad win where the kids were screaming and yelling, but you stayed calm and you managed the situation. If we get something right, we want to watch that film because we can recreate that environment. So that's the second one, watching game film.
Speaker 1:And the third thing you can do outside of the game to practice for game time is to get a coach. And I'm not just saying that because I am a coach, I'm saying get a coach because it's the most practical way to practice for game time. It's an hour a week and you put it on your calendar. There's accountability there and in that session you take all these tools that I talk about on the podcast, all these ideas, and you actually do them. And that kind of practice is very deliberate, it's very intentional. I'm going to just read one of the client testimonials that I had recently. I think it applies to this practice and game time of life. He said I run, I bike, play basketball, lift weights because it keeps me healthy and it gives me a physical release that leaves me with more energy and clarity. I view coaching the same way as I view exercising. Without my coaching with Tommy, I feel like I miss a step. With it, I have my tune-up and he helps propel me towards success in all aspects of my life. So if you don't already have a coach set up a strategy session. Set it up with me, that would be the easiest thing. But look at other coaches. Having a coach will change your performance in the game of life and you put in the work outside of the game and you're going to perform better.
Speaker 1:When I was playing college football, there was this drill we did. We split up at the beginning of practice by position. So I'm with the running backs and we would do this drill where you're holding the ball in one hand and you hop on a foot and you place your opposite hand on the ground and then you hop to the other foot, switch the ball in your hands, put the other hand on the ground and you go back and forth hop, hop, hop for 15 yards, turn around, do a coming back. We would do this every day in practice and it looked goofy. We would make fun of each other. Then in a game, one of the running backs running down the sideline got hit, stumbled, switched the ball in his hand, put his hand down, popped back up and kept running and we were going crazy on the sidelines. It was really like that, mr Miyagi, moment of the practice just became natural in the game.
Speaker 1:You can't just show up for game time and expect to perform well, no matter what game you're playing, whether it's sports or it's being a dad, or it's being a business owner or a husband. We can't expect to stay calm in unexpected situations, in chaos, if we haven't practiced being calm. Hard things they're going to come our way and we can do these drills, these three drills not much time. Three minutes of some breath work a day, five minutes to reflect at the end of each day, one hour a week of a coaching session Doesn't take much, but you do that and you will see life change. You'll start winning the games that really matter, right? If we look at the scoreboard from last week. You'll start winning the relationship games. You'll start winning the health game All right. So that's what I got for you guys this week. Go to TommyGCoachingcom if you want to set up a strategy session, and I'll catch you next week.
