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
085: It's All About Your 1:1 Time
I send a weekly reflection form to my guys the day before each session – just four quick questions so they can get some insight on what's working, what's not, and what to change.
And I've noticed a pattern.
Looking back at all the answers, a lot of guys celebrate one-on-one time.
Individual time with their wife. With their kid. With their dad or anyone they care about. That one-on-one time tends to stand out as a highlight, and something they want more of.
This podcast talks about why one-on-one time it's so meaningful, and how to get more of it.
Because at the end of the day, or the end of your life, it's those meaningful relationships that matter most.
And spending individual time with someone is the most effective and enjoyable way to nurture that relationship.
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 85.
Speaker 1:I have been giving some thought to people that take their time, take their energy to make plans and help an organization, donate to a community or something like that. People that give back and I'll volunteer for a day here or there, but someone else is planning it and I just kind of show up but the people that round up other people or collect money or make plans ahead of time, it's something that I have admired, and maybe I'm saying this because I want a little more of that in my life, but I got a buddy who's been doing this volunteer or giving thing around Thanksgiving every year and pretty much what he does for the last seven years is he plans enough and gathers enough money to make 50 Thanksgiving meals for families, all the trimmings, everything you need for a Thanksgiving meal in a basket that the family picks up and then takes home and is able to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for their family. And I was talking to him and I was asking him about it, I was like seven years man, like what was the year one like? And he was like, oh, it was a shit show. He was doing it with this one organization and he was doing 25 meals and they pulled it together and anyway he stuck with it and seven years now this has become like a tradition for him and it's just helping a lot of people that need it. Like that's so cool that 50 people, 50 families so you know times that by four or five that many people are having a family dinner at home and they wouldn't have because this guy's pulling them together. And this year he's got our shield lock, all of us kind of helping out. And the other day we're just sitting at a coffee shop around a table and each of us are scrolling through our phones on Walmart to price things out and figuring out logistics, how to store 50 turkeys for a couple nights before we hand them out, and how to set up Venmo to collect money. And I was feeling energized by the whole thing and I don't think I would have self-started to do this myself. So I guess I appreciate my buddy for pulling me in and when I think about this I think that we can get stuck in our bubbles and in our really busy days and forget that there are people out there that could really use our help or our service or our time. Anyway, I think this podcast is going to come out the week of Thanksgiving Happy Thanksgiving, all that. So today's podcast is not about donating or giving back Today's podcast.
Speaker 1:I got this idea because I send a weekly reflection form to all the men that I coach. So a day before their session they get a reflection form I coach, so a day before their session they get a reflection form. And the goal of reflecting, whether on this form or just by yourself, is to get some insight into what's working in your life, what's filling you up, what isn't working, what you want less of, and this form that goes out. It's four simple questions and one of the questions is list three recent wins, and something I've noticed by going back and looking at some of these is that a lot of guys celebrate one-on-one time with people, so that could be their kids, their wife, their friends. It's a common theme that's kind of spread out in wins, and nine times out of 10, they'll say it just felt good. When I looked back and I thought about my week. That was like a highlight and it felt good to connect, and I don't do it enough. So since there's this clear pattern that when a man sits down to reflect on the last week, one-on-one time is usually a highlight, I wanted to just say get more one-on-one time in your life. That's kind of the point of this podcast is a reminder to get more one-on-one time in your life because it's meaningful and there is something about being face-to-face with a person and connecting with them. It's fulfilling, it fills you up.
Speaker 1:So when I'm getting ready to record this podcast, I'm like, all right, well, what one-on-one time did I appreciate last week and last Sunday there was this window of time where there were neighbor kids over and they were entertaining our one and a half year old Marlo and Nell, our older one. They were all playing, having a good time. It was beautiful outside and Brenda said, hey, do you want to throw the football around? And my first thought was like, ah, not really, I want to rake the leaves up, I want to cut some of these bushes back. And I stopped and I was like, ah, it's a beautiful fall day, it's like perfect, throw the football around weather. So I said yes, and we have this football that's. It's not high school size, it's a little smaller, but it's perfect size football to toss around and Brenda can throw a pretty good spiral. So we're just tossing it back and forth and taught her how to catch over your shoulder. So we were kind of running some different mini routes and just having a really good time. I know we laughed a little bit. I'm not sure what we were laughing about, but it was that one-on-one time that, if I were to reflect on my past week like that stuck out as a win. That just like being outside with my wife and us smiling, laughing together, not trying to get shit done, not looking at our phones, laughing together, not trying to get shit done, not looking at our phones and I think this idea that relationships are the most important part of our life is something that, as we get older, we can start finding some truth in that.
Speaker 1:I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast recently and I love the Tim Ferriss podcast, I probably talk about it a lot on here and he was interviewing John Batiste and at one point John kind of flipped the script and asked him a question and the question was if there were three core sets of ideas or beliefs that you live your life by and you wiped everything else away. What would those core beliefs be? And one of the three that Tim said was life's all about relationships. It's all about relationships and it just it's on the top of my mind. Right, the men that I coach, they'll come to me and we'll start working on vision for life or for the next year and how to be more productive and get more time back in your day and how to find balance and really quickly, like after just a session or two or three, it becomes super clear that they want more quality time with people in their lives.
Speaker 1:And I think the closest relationship we have is with our wife and I think that's why a lot of the guys I coach with we will coach around our relationship with our wife, because we have a lot of important people in our life. But when you think about who your wife is to you, I mean you guys are partners together in life your parents, your planners, your lovers, your confidants. You cheerlead for each other all these different roles that we play with our wife and it can get confusing and it can get complicated and there could be a lot of friction in that relationship, and Tim went on in this podcast to say when he's in relationships with people, he likes to ask himself do I like the version of myself that I am when I'm with this person? So if you were to ask yourself do I like the version I am when I'm with my wife, what would the response be? The response be and if it's no, what Tim was saying and I like totally aligned with this, this is what a lot of my coaching is about. If you don't like who you're being, it's not about her, it's not about your wife, it's about yourself. So relationships are this area where we can actually learn about ourself, and there's a lot of opportunity for personal development just in the relationships that we have, and it could be a relationship with someone at work Are you being the coworker you want to be or the boss you want to be? And, of course, with parenting, right, if we want to be a better father, how are we showing up? Do we like the way we're showing up as a dad? And if the answer is no to any of these areas, there's an opportunity to learn something about yourself, and I think that's a very curious way to look at relationships in an insightful way.
Speaker 1:So this relationship thing, it's just hit me in a few different areas this week. It's on this reflection form from the guys I coach, it's on this podcast with Tim Ferriss and I lead a weekly group call. It's actually bi-weekly. It's a hangout call with men that I've worked with before and I'm thinking about maybe opening it up to everybody, to all my email subscribers. But last week the way the calls really work is we do a quick check-in and then I have some kind of prompt question for the group that we discuss as men.
Speaker 1:And the question I had last week was from one of James Clear's newsletters. He's the guy that wrote Atomic Habits and he has this short, quick newsletter and there's always a question at the end and this question was which activities are the best expression of you For me? The first thing my mind went to was sports, was that feeling of flowing, being active, competing, being alive. That's an expression of myself. And as we're going around the room or the Zoom call and guys are answering, one guy says he feels he expresses himself best when he is one-on-one with someone else, and that kind of caught me off guard because I was thinking of activities like sports, another guy said cooking, another guy said tennis and he said one-on-one time with someone else, and so he spoke about it a little bit more. And he said just sitting down across the table with someone else, I feel like I'm listening and taking it in and can give the other person like all of myself, and it made me go back and think about all these other one-on-one relationships that we're talking about. So it keeps showing up and my next prompt on that call was can you spend five minutes doing one of those things tomorrow? The activity that's a full expression of yourself. And he kind of laughed because he already had lunch scheduled with his wife for the next day and they hadn't had some one-on-one time lately. So he was on top of it. And I'm throwing all this at you because I want you to pick one person and spend five minutes with them tomorrow.
Speaker 1:One-on-one time. Make it easy, make it someone that you're already planning on being with and you can let them know if it's your wife or if it's your kid like, hey, let's just hang out for a little bit, just me and you and we haven't really connected in a while and you can talk, you can kick the soccer ball around. You can play with Play-Doh or draw or go to lunch that one-on-one time. It'll fill you up. And the cool thing is is, when you reach out to someone to do that, it doesn't matter who it is. They're going to appreciate it. They're going to appreciate it just as much, because it's a human thing to want to connect, to want to be with other humans. So that's it. That's what I got for you today. Go out there one-on-one time someone tomorrow or even later today. Hope you have an awesome week, happy Thanksgiving and I'll catch you next time.
