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
078: Get Ahead of the Blow-Up
When we snap, it seems to happen suddenly.
Like it's the last straw, and there's no stopping the volcano eruption.
But there are ways to stop it.
Today's episode will do a quick review of the thinking cycle – the triad of the only aspects you can control in your life: your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
This thinking cycle is the key element in getting in front of the blow-ups and choosing a better way to communicate when you're mad.
This is how we slow down time and see the world as Neo saw it in the Matrix.
Listen in and learn to choose your reaction rather than feeling like it just bubbled up and came out of nowhere.
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 78, the Durable Dad podcast. Hope you are doing well.
Speaker 1:Today I'm going to talk about getting ahead, of flipping out right those few moments that we have to not blow up at our kid, and I'm going to start by telling you about this guy that I was coaching last week and this is not a super unique story, right? This was a family road trip that he went on him, his wife, his two daughters and it was an awesome trip. Everything went really smoothly until the ride home. On the drive home, they stopped for coffee, his wife went in to pick up the order and, within five minutes of her being gone, the volcano exploded in the car. His girls were thirsty they're seven and three years old and he went into the back, filled up their water bottles and handed them back to his seven-year-old, who said no, I want juice instead of water. Now this is at the end of a road trip where it was a weekend full of hotels, late nights, hanging out with grandma and grandpa, saying yes to requests that they usually wouldn't say yes to, to have a good time, let the kids be kids and overall, just out of the norm. A lot of stimulation for everyone. And the seven-year-old wanted juice early in the morning and the dad was like nope, drawing the line here. He was being patient, explaining to her why not, but then the metal water bottle came flying from the back seat right into the side of his head and he said he went from nice dad to mean dad in a flash. So you might be like, yeah, he should flip out. His daughter was arguing, she should have just listened and she threw a water bottle in his face. Like, yeah, he needs to yell at her and put her in her place. That may be true. Like he is justified to get mad for what happened.
Speaker 1:And I say this on the podcast. I'm not a parenting coach, but I am a men's coach and what I do know is that when guys flip out, go from zero to 100, yell at their kids, they never feel good about it afterwards. And from everything I've learned from the podcast Brenda and I listen to, to the books we've read on parenting letting our unchecked anger turn into yelling, turn into a rant at our kid doesn't help them do better the next time. And that's the parenting side of it. But the men's side of it is that you feel like shit later You're bummed. You don't want to let the anger get the best of you in that moment.
Speaker 1:And a trip that's been awesome. The whole weekend takes a little bit of a turn in this one moment. This story to me and he's telling me now he's like but I get it. Like my daughter, she's been said yes to all weekend. I'm saying no and she's standing her ground and juice is a lot more tasty than water with all the sugar in it and I understand why she wants it. But me, I'm still the dad that flips out and I'm the one that gets impatient and I don't want to do that. My seven-year-old goes silent, my three-year-old starts to cry and it just kind of sucked. So you listeners out there you know that it's not about the water bottle hitting him in the head. That's not why he blew up.
Speaker 1:So I asked him what's the buildup here? He already kind of told me that he was kind of on edge for most of the trip. Right, you're trying to parent while in different environments and also trying to have fun. They're not vacations. They're family trips, right, like these kinds of road trips with our kids. They're not vacations where we chill right, you're still parenting the whole time. You're not there to check out and relax and it is easy to be on edge the whole time. So when we're coaching, we're talking about this. Okay, he can see his daughter's side of the story.
Speaker 1:What's going through his brain in that moment as the argument is happening about saying no to the juice, right before the water bottle comes up, like what's your brain telling you? And he's like I've been patient enough. I've been patient all weekend. Now they should listen and she should be respecting me. When I say something, she should be listening. So that's a big one for dads, right? My kids should listen to me. My kids aren't respecting me.
Speaker 1:And in this case, when we're coaching and we're in that reflection moment, we're playing with this in our brain. What is our brain making it mean when our kids don't listen or when our kid is disrespecting us and he said, it means I'm not doing a good job. That thought, right, there is what we built a thinking cycle around. So the thinking cycle. To recap, if you think of a triangle, that's a cycle. The top of it is our thought, and his thought right now is I'm not doing a good job. There's all the anger bubbling on top, all the she should be doing this, she should respect me, but the thought underneath it is I'm not doing a good job.
Speaker 1:And when he thinks that at the top of the thinking cycle, it goes down and it creates an emotion, and that emotion for him was disappointment. And when he's feeling disappointed, the energy and the emotion of disappointment fuels an action, and that action is a bubbling up of frustration, of anger. It turns into that yelling, that outburst and saying words that he later regrets. All those actions complete the cycle. It goes back up to the thought that I'm not doing a good job. All those actions aren't the way he wants to parent.
Speaker 1:And then he starts to prove himself true, I'm not doing a good job. So I write this on the board. He looks at it and he says, okay, yes, that makes total sense. I see that I am in that cycle. I might not be aware of it all the time, but that makes sense. How do I stop between the emotion and the action? He even said he was like. So, in between disappointment and the yelling, if you drew a line there, how do I stop in between? And that is the question to ask, because that space in between the emotion and the action is the slowing down, is the getting ahead of the blowups. It's responding instead of reacting.
Speaker 1:I kind of think of it as breaking the thinking cycle. So my answer to him is you get coached, like what he's doing right there as we're talking. You build awareness of your current thinking cycles and you have an outside perspective, an outside person help you build those thinking cycles because they're subconscious and self-awareness. Knowing our thinking cycles is the first step to change. So my first answer to him is he's already doing it right. He has already signed up to get coached. Now, as guys get coached and this was my experience too I signed up for coaching sessions with a coach and I'd come with real life situations that were happening and how I wanted to handle them next time.
Speaker 1:And as I started learning and becoming more aware of my patterns, I started implementing some habits outside of the coaching sessions which really also help get us ahead of our blowups, slow down our reaction time in all areas of life and those, if you listen to this podcast a lot, you're gonna not be surprised with what I have to say, but it's journaling, it's thought dumping. You take out a piece of paper and you write down all the thoughts that are spinning in your head. Another habit is breath work or meditation. Get to understand how you're feeling in the moment. Be present. If we want to be present and go slow in the high, intense times, we have to learn how to be present outside of those times. So, meditating, meditating, breathing, journaling, the thought dumps, those are the habits that you wanna pick up. But it starts. What I've found with myself and with other men is it starts with hiring a coach, hiring someone that helps reflect to you, because self-reflection isn't something that we're taught. And to slow down a thinking cycle, to break a thinking cycle, we really have to reflect on our behavior and what we can control, which are our thoughts, our emotions, our actions. So those really are the habits that are going to get you ahead of fast reactions, of blowups.
Speaker 1:This work, these things that I'm talking about. They're not hard, they're very easy to do, they don't take a lot of time, but you need to be consistent with them and you need to put them into practice. Think of it as brushing your teeth right. Brushing your teeth now, when you're 30, 40, 50 years old pretty simple to do, but when you started brushing your teeth, we probably don't remember brushing our teeth when we're two, three, four and five. But I remember brushing my kids' teeth when they're two, three, four and five and it's a pain in the ass and they don't want to do it and it's a struggle.
Speaker 1:And some of the biggest arguments I've had with my daughter is when we're brushing our teeth and that's what we're adding in here in our daily life are some of these new habits that clean our mind out, that help our bodies learn new ways to behave.
Speaker 1:So they're easy, they don't take long, but there is going to be some resistance when you start doing it and that's why coaching, I think, is the fastest way to change, because you're committing to something, you're investing money into yourself, you're putting appointments on the calendar where you're meeting with somebody else and you show up and that other person has been there, knows these skills, it is more fluid for them and they can help you implement those into your life. And in those coaching sessions you actually start to have the skills to slow down your reaction and just control yourself more right Self-control. Knowing yourself right, we get to know ourself and then we can perform better in life. So I'll bookend this with set up a strategy session. That's what these free strategy sessions are all about. So go to TommyGCoachingcom, grab a spot on my calendar. We'll talk it's straightforward and build some new habits to break your thinking cycles, slow down your reaction, get ahead of the blowups. Hope you have an awesome week.
