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
071: Control your Anger like a Stoic
School probably taught you how to read and write, but skipped over how to handle bad news, failure, or disappointment.
This is where stoicism comes in.
Stoicism teaches us how to handle the difficult things in life.
One of THE hardest skills to develop is to focus on what’s in our control rather than what’s out of our control.
It’s a core principle of stoicism, and discerning and focussing on what you control will free you of the bulk of your difficulties.
Listen to today’s episode for stoic insight on managing anger, anxiety and fear.
You’ll find that it all boils down to perception, because perception runs your life.
This is good news because perception is also in your control.
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. All right, what's up? Episode number 71,. Back from the holiday weekend, feeling good, feeling ready to rock. Got a lot going on in this month of July and leading into August. If you're in Colorado, check out the website right now for the Durable Dad Day. It's a day to slow down, check out of the noise and just be with a couple guys in nature having some good talks and just time to decompress. So all good stuff happening over here.
Speaker 1:Our subject for this episode is going to be stoicism, and one of the guys that listens to the podcast he just said I've heard you mention stoicism before and I see these stoic quotes here and there. But what the heck is stoicism? And I'm not going to dive in and answer that whole question, because I actually recorded this podcast already and Brenda was like, eh, just drug on too much. It sounded like a history lesson and that's not what I want to do. So we're re-recording this and we're making it more straightforward, more applicable to how you can use stoicism in your day-to-day, how I use it in my day-to-day life and along the way, I think you'll start to get some of the concepts and more of the Stoicism 101 as we go through. So I used to think that being Stoic was that straight-faced guy that nothing affected them, that they almost seemed like they didn't give a shit about what was happening or who was around them, that they were just kind of a hard-ass. And being a hard-ass is not what stoicism is about. It's not being straight-faced. A person that practices Stoicism is actually very aware of their emotions and of the environment around them, what people are doing, what people are saying. That's kind of a misconception I had about Stoicism before. I kind of dove into the philosophy because that's what it is.
Speaker 1:Stoicism is a philosophy, and not just a thinking philosophy and a debating philosophy, but almost rules on how to live and we don't really get taught how to live right. When we're in school. We get taught how to add and subtract, read and write. We get our history lessons and learn about how business works or art or whatever your majors were in college, but no one really teaches us how to handle the difficult things in life, like if you fail. If you strike out in baseball, right, a coach is going to tell you keep your chin up, don't worry, you'll get another at bat. But they really tell you how to deal with that disappointment or the frustration. If you get pissed off at somebody, you know when you're young and you're growing up, someone tells you to calm down, like, don't overreact. They're telling us what to do, don't overreact, but they're not telling us how to do it. So, practicing stoicism, you actually learn how to master your emotions, how to master your reactions in life. So one of the major concepts of stoicism is to only focus on what is in your.
Speaker 1:Marcus Aurelius, one of the big Stoics, said external things are not the problem, it's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now. And this is the thinking cycle, and I talk about the thinking cycle on this podcast. It's that tool. That's from cognitive behavioral therapy and it's the framework that our thoughts create our emotions. Our emotions fuel our actions and our actions start creating our reality and our beliefs about ourself. So this cycle thoughts, emotions, actions are the only thing that we control, and that's what the Stoics are talking about. We don't control what other people say talking about. We don't control what other people say. We don't control when our employee gets an email back to us or when our employee screws up. We don't control what our wife does or doesn't do. Plans change, unexpected things happen. We don't control who the president is People things happen. We don't control who the president is right, people, external circumstances. If we focus on trying to change those or wanting those to be different, we just waste time and energy. So I'm going to give you three of the emotions that you can master, that you can manage using some stoic principles.
Speaker 1:So the first one we're going to talk about a guy favorite is anger. So Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome this was around 100 AD when Rome was the most powerful empire in the world. It was kind of on the decline, but Marcus Aurelius is the emperor, probably one of the most important people. So he was a Stoic and he had this to say about anger when a man irritates you, you must know that it is your own opinion which has irritated you. So when you feel irritated, when you feel insulted, it's not what another person says or does, it's your opinion.
Speaker 1:I was working with a guy and talking about this topic when he was doing a presentation and he's a program director and had this talk that he needed to give to the people that were in this program and they needed the information and it was one of the main presentations of the program and one of the guys didn't show up and my client was pissed about it because his thought was his opinion was that this guy's disrespecting me. The guy not attending had nothing to do with my client's anger or frustration. His irritation was coming from the thought that guy's disrespecting me. So we look at a quote like this from Marcus Aurelius and we kind of start playing with it in our brain and we start to realize that we could have a different opinion of someone else's actions. Maybe the person is overworked and he stretched himself too thin. Maybe he needs help with his time management and he double booked himself, or maybe he's unmotivated for another reason. Having a different opinion like that one is going to alleviate that anger from you, but it's also going to give you this opportunity to maybe help, maybe coach this person that is in your program and someone that he is responsible for lifting up and helping them find their success. He is responsible for lifting up and helping them find their success. So when Marcus Aurelius says when a man irritates you, you must know that it is your opinion which has irritated you. It's a time to pause.
Speaker 1:I did a podcast about anger as a messenger. When you're irritated, when you feel disrespected, annoyed, there's a message in there to explore. If you notice you're taking something personally, break down a quote like this from Marcus Aurelius and see how it applies to your situation today. And then kind of along the same lines, epictetus he's another Stoic philosopher. There's this guidance he has.
Speaker 1:What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgment about these things. So things in the world that might upset us political issues, social issues, decisions that your company makes, or the interest rates, the cost of childcare or taxes these things that might upset us. It's not the cost of childcare that's making us mad. It's our thought or our opinion, our judgment, that childcare should be more affordable for everyone, or childcare shouldn't be that expensive. But why does it even matter to think about life this way? And I think it's important? Because you acknowledge that you're in control of how you feel. And if you're in control of how you feel, then you're in control of how you show up in the world. So, with this childcare example, if you wanna grumble and be pissed about childcare. You can choose to be. Or you could have a thought like I'm grateful that there's childcare at all. I'm grateful that I do have the money and different options for childcare.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there are things to be mad about. Maybe it's the political issues, maybe it's the social issues or even stuff that your company's doing. We can choose to feel angry about those things and, using that energy, maybe you use it to make some change. But it is helpful to know that you're choosing your anger, your discontentment, because the world isn't making you angry. Your thinking is making you angry. When there's traffic, when there's construction, when there's delays or changes in plans, it's not the world that creates that frustration inside you.
Speaker 1:The Stoics tell us that there's an opportunity to pause and see our perception, see our judgments and how we're creating our own frustration inside. All right, so the next emotion we're going to use Stoic principles to help us manage is anxiety. Going back to Marcus Aurelius, today I escaped anxiety or no, I discarded it because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside. So our perceptions create our anxiety inside of us. We have a lot of responsibilities, we have a to-do list that we have listed out. I was just talking to a guy about this the other day and one of his big perspective shifts was how he looks at his responsibilities and his to-do lists. He used to have this I have to get these done, more of a burden kind of mindset, the perception of I have to. He shifted that perception to I get to do these things, these are my responsibilities, I chose them, I want to do that. That's a perception shift and that's all inside of you, that's all within your control.
Speaker 1:We can hold a lot of anxiety around money and anxiety can around money, and anxiety can be crippling. I don't know if you guys have seen Inside Out 2, but we went and saw it last week and the new emotion is anxiety. There's a couple others, I'm not going to spoil it too much, but anxiety can take over, right? There's this scene. If you haven't seen Inside Out 2, you can skip over this next 15 seconds. But there's a scene where they go into the. What's her name?
Speaker 1:Riley's imagination, and anxiety is using Riley's imagination against her. We're picturing all these negative possibilities in the future. If we're worried about money, we think about all the things that might go wrong if we don't have money, but we're using our imagination against us instead of for us. Deciding to use our imagination to predict positive things, or at least safe outcomes, is going to ease our anxiety, is going to ease any of the stress or worries that we have. So this is also going to tie into the last emotion that I'm going to talk about fear. So we can use the Stoic philosophy to manage our fear. Seneca, another Stoic philosopher, haven't mentioned him yet says we suffer more in imagination than in reality. All right, so that imagination that we can use against ourself. Our fear is much stronger in our head than it is in the real world.
Speaker 1:And there's this exercise called fear setting. That's originally taught by Tim Ferris, who is kind of a modern day stoic, and basically you list out all of your fears. This goes back to the stoics not having emotions, like they do have emotions. You list out what you're afraid of, right? A guy was considering selling his business and we went through a fear setting exercise together where you name all your fears, you kind of rate the possibility of them actually happening. If they do happen, what's the recovery? Look like.
Speaker 1:Naming our fears, getting them out of our imagination, is a stoic principle, right? Anytime you have a big decision to make, there's always going to be fear. Our brain's always worried about the unknown and it starts to imagine all those negative things that might happen. I use this with a client that was looking to buy a second house. I've used it for myself deciding to move across country. Or when Brenda and I quit our jobs and traveled to Central America, there was a lot of fears around it and I got them all out and wrote down the situations that might happen, and all of my fears were much stronger in my imagination than they are on paper. So those are three emotions that you can start to master and manage with the stoic principles Anger, anxiety, fear.
Speaker 1:These emotions are illogical. Emotions are illogical. Right, there's subconscious things going on in our brain that are blaming external circumstances for how we feel, or our imagination is telling us all the negative things that are going to happen, and they're irrational. They probably won't even happen.
Speaker 1:And I think Stoicism speaks to a lot of men.
Speaker 1:I mean there are women Stoics, but I think it appeals to a lot of men because there's this logic behind it.
Speaker 1:You can almost get to a black and white view of what's happening when you discern your thoughts versus the outside facts, and guys like black and white Guys like to be logical, but if you notice yourself overreacting when plans change, when a dinner reservation gets moved or your wife asks you to run an extra errand that you weren't planning on running, or you're worrying too much about where you're spending your time, and if you're doing enough, there's a lot of irrational emotions and irrational things happening in our brain. Right, put it into a thinking cycle so you can see what's actually happening and what you actually have control over. These stoic principles can really help break down what's going on and give us the power to think differently about our situation so that we can feel more empowered, that we can feel more confident and we can have control of our life. All right, that's what I got for you guys this week. Hope you have a good one and I'll catch you next time.
