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
073: Dismantle Your Playbooks
A playbook is a set of expectations we have for another person.
If you were the coach of a football team, you’d have a set of playbooks, and you’d expect your team members to play the game accordingly.
We do the same thing in life with ordinary people, except they rarely play according to our expectations.
And that’s why our kids’ can be friggen frustrating. Or our wife, employees, or parents…
The helpful thing to do is to take a look at your playbooks.
For example, if you’re holding a playbook for your wife, ask yourself:
- If I could wave a magic wand, how would I want my wife to act?
- If she behaved exactly the way I wanted, how would I feel? And what would I believe?
For for the final, big-kicker question:
- Can you believe that right now? Can you find evidence to support that belief without her changing?
The answer is almost always “yes.”
This is how we release tension from a relationship and stop trying to control the other person.
Listen to today’s episode so you can stop wishing the other person would change. You’ll both feel better, and it’ll be on your own terms.
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 73.
Speaker 1:This week we're kind of revisiting a topic, and that topic is a playbook. Playbooks are expectations we have for another person, and I talked about it in episode 12, and it's come up a couple times in coaching sessions recently, so we're gonna do another episode on it. A little refresh, if you remember that episode. If you don't remember that episode, you don't have to go back, just listen in here. So a playbook is a set of expectations that we have for another person.
Speaker 1:Imagine that you're a coach and all the people in your life are on your team and, as the coach, you have a playbook in your hands and the playbook says how each person is supposed to play the game and if they play the game the way that your playbook says, you can be successful. This is what we actually do. We try to control the players in our life like we're the coach. We try to control things we can't control and usually we're not aware of it. This is all happening subconsciously, that we have these playbooks for other people our employees, our parents, our wife, our kids and then when they don't play the game the way that we want them to they don't follow our playbook we get pissed and we try to fix them and try to tell them how they should play the game. But we're not their coach and our wife gets to play the game the way that she wants to, and same with our parents or our boss or our neighbor or our kids. We don't get to control other people and your brain might be telling you, yeah, but our kids can't just do whatever they want, they can't stay up all hours, they can't just be on their phone all the time. Our employees can't just show up late or take long breaks or be late on their assignments.
Speaker 1:This is where boundaries come into play. So boundaries go hand in hand with playbooks, and I did an episode on boundaries, episode 11. So you can look at that. Playbooks, on the other hand, are these underlying expectations that we have for people and on this episode we're going to focus on our wife and we're usually not aware of these expectations and when they're not followed, it irritates us. So, even though we're not consciously aware that we're carrying around this playbook and how our wife should act. When she doesn't follow this, we get irritated. We get frustrated. Anytime you are frustrated or annoyed with someone, it's usually because you have a playbook for them and the helpful thing to do here is to get the playbook out, make yourself aware of it and sometimes you'll laugh at it, because playbooks can get pretty ridiculous of what we expect from people and sometimes it'll release some tension, it'll release some of the expectations and then you don't get annoyed and then the relationship feels lighter. It feels more free. We're not trying to control the other person.
Speaker 1:For example, a guy that I'm working with he's an awesome dad and he's trying to be more patient around his kids. And the other night it was the end of the night, it was bedtime and his typical easy son was having a hard time winding down going to bed and his other son that has a harder time managing his tantrums and everything like that, did one little thing and this dad lost his temper, lost his cool for a second. He grabbed his kid and he put him on the bed, probably grabbed him a little more firmly than he wanted to and right away he was like shit, my frustration got the best of me and he was bummed about it. And so we're talking about it in our coaching session and I kind of explained like our anger in that moment isn't because of what happened in front of us. It's anger, frustration, annoyance that's been building up, sometimes from the last 24 hours, sometimes the last week hours, sometimes the last week. Anger doesn't just all of a sudden boil over in the moment, it starts at an earlier time.
Speaker 1:So I asked him when did you start feeling annoyed earlier in the day? And he said it was in the afternoon around five o'clock. His wife had asked him earlier to grill some burgers and if he could start the grill at 4.30. And he was kind of frustrated because he works till five and, yeah, he works from home but he's really trying to stick to his work hours. So he said I can't do it at 4.30, but I'll do it at five. That was that Day went on. And then at 4.45, he asked his son to go start the grill. His son came down and said well, mom already cooked the burgers. So he was kind of pissed off about that because he had kind of planned his day to get off at the right time to cook the burgers and she didn't tell him that she was cooking them. Okay, is that the first time you felt frustrated that day? And he was like no, actually earlier I was working downstairs and my wife came down I think it was around noon and she had a question about logistical plans for the kids later in the week and I was downstairs, I was working and we talked about not doing interruptions while I'm at work. So that pissed me off.
Speaker 1:As he's saying this, I'm starting to notice his playbook. As he's saying this, I'm starting to notice his playbook. He has expectations for her and she's not meeting those expectations and he's letting it drag him down. He's letting it frustrate him and then eventually he blows up at his kids later in the night. So what he wants to do is understand this playbook that he has, and the way you start doing that is you ask yourself if I could wave a magic wand and she'd behave exactly the way that I wanted her to, how would she act? And so when I asked him this, he said she wouldn't interrupt me, but if I had something that I needed, she would respond to me. And if she does ask me something, I don't even have to respond. I could just ignore her.
Speaker 1:And he started to say this with a smile on his face and this guy's very self-aware, so he's letting his brain just run all these subconscious thoughts that he hasn't looked at before. And he said that she shouldn't expect anything from him until after 5 pm. And then we really started laughing because he was like really, I just want a 1950s wife that has dinner ready when I'm done with work, she's told the kids to be good for dad. When dad gets home, the house is clean, slippers are ready, maybe even a drink is poured. So these playbooks can really live in the back of our minds.
Speaker 1:And the next question you ask is you imagine that your wife follows it? If your wife acted this way, like a 1950s wife, how would you feel? And he said he'd feel respected, he would feel grateful, he would feel like she really loved me. So here's the thing he can believe all of those things right now. We don't have to wait for someone to act a certain way in order to believe these things that he's respected, that she really loves him. We just have to believe those things right now. So then the third question you ask yourself is can you believe that right now, without her changing, can you believe that she respects you, that she loves you, and what comes up is evidence that she does?
Speaker 1:He remembered that earlier that day she was on the phone trying to get him speaking gigs. He owns a tech company and he started to realize all the support she gives him in the business, like he started the business, but it wasn't just him, they were doing it together. And how much support she gives him and how much of the family planning she does and how, on top of her shit, she is the cheerleading that she gives him along the way, that she really believes in what he's doing. This is going to change the way that he communicates. This is going to help make their relationship better, because this new perspective will help him stay calm in those moments where he gets frustrated, where he gets annoyed. When his wife comes down in the middle of the day, he's going to notice his brain running this playbook and making her presence mean that she's not respecting him.
Speaker 1:As soon as you notice that, as soon as you're onto yourself like that, you can take a breath and you can have a normal conversation, and maybe even there's a boundary to set If it's a reasonable expectation. If it's a reasonable play you want your wife to run like, try not to interrupt me as much during work, you can have a conversation about it. Maybe you figure out ways where, if you do need to talk about personal stuff, you do it between these hours or we do it over email. But if we keep our playbooks to ourself or we don't even know what the playbook is, usually we don't even communicate the playbook. We don't have the conversation about what our expectations are. Or when we communicate our playbook, we do it from a place of stop fucking coming down here and interrupting me. I told you a hundred times not to do that. That's not a productive conversation. That's when a playbook is damaging a relationship because you haven't done your own work to control your anger, control your temper. And going through these steps will help you do that. So doing this exercise, asking yourself these three questions, will make any relationship better. And if you're listening and you're feeling like I don't carry playbooks, it's not me.
Speaker 1:Anytime you are frustrated with someone or you're annoyed with someone, it's usually because you have a playbook and maybe you don't wish that your wife was a 1950s wife, but maybe you wish that she worked more and made more money or didn't complain so much or was nicer to you. I mean, I've heard so many from guys. She should gas up the car when it needs gas, or she should be more positive in the morning. She should clean the dog shit out of the yard instead of always making me do it. Sort the laundry the right way.
Speaker 1:Dishes I mean how to load the dishwasher, where to put dishes. Brenda and I had a conversation about that a couple of weeks ago. Brenda had a playbook for me that I shouldn't leave dishes in our middle sink. We have three sinks. Can't leave. Shouldn't leave dishes in our middle sink. We have three sinks. Can't leave dishes that are soaking in the middle sink. So I had a bowl that was full of yogurt and it was in the middle sink and Brenda was annoyed with it and she kind of caught herself and she was like explained hey, can you just keep the middle sink clear, put all the dirty dishes in the right sink, even if they're just soaking. I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. I had no idea she had that expectation. She didn't even realize she had that playbook, but she was getting frustrated and then she finally communicated it and we were able to laugh at it.
Speaker 1:So that's how sneaky playbooks can be. They can be little things, they can be big things, but defining your playbook will help your relationship. If you need to make some boundaries, that's the next step, but you still, you have to understand your expectations first. Define your playbook. Ask yourself the question if I had a magic wand, how would I want my wife to behave, or how would I want this person that I'm annoyed with to behave? And then let your brain flow, dump it all out. Dump out all the expectations, and you might want to keep some of the expectations, set a boundary, and then there's others that you might just want to throw away because they're a little ridiculous and you just want to like the person for who they are. That's what I got for you guys today. Have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
