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
092: The Key to Stop Overanalyzing – Make Peace With Your Past Decisions
We all have past decisions that make us cringe. Things we'd do differently the second time around, given the chance.
But if we don't make peace with those decisions, they'll cause us to procrastinate and overanalyze our decisions today.
They'll make a dent in our confidence and lead us to subconsciously question ourselves when we have a big decision on our plate.
You'll leave this ep with three steps that'll help you make peace with your past decisions so you can be a confident decision-maker today:
1. Awareness – ID the regrets that bubble up when you notice yourself overanalyzing.
2. Language – Stop trying to make the "right" decision and instead work towards the best decision, given your circumstance, information, situation.
3. Confidence – Recognize that you're not perfect, and you're still you can still hold yourself in high regard. You'll make mistakes, and you'll recover
Tune in to learn how to free yourself from past choices and confidently make decisions in the present.
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 92. It is Friday morning for me. This episode gets released on Tuesday, march 18th, and today's Friday, march 14th, and in between now and then is the best holiday of the year St Patrick's Day.
Speaker 1:And this year Brenda, the girls and I are going to Chicago and we're going to go to the Southside Irish Parade. I haven't been in a while. I'm excited to bring our girls there, and this year it's a little bit special because my cousin, katie, passed away a couple of weeks ago and there's going to be a big memorial there for her. She grew up on the Southside and this parade's just. It's like a core childhood memory and I talked to my dad last night. He's telling me that one of the neighbors cooked 80 pounds of corned beef and he's picking up 10 loaves of rye bread that get baked freshly at this one deli and has to bring them there Saturday morning, and one of my cousins is bringing portillos for 100 people. So it's going to be a big celebration of life for my cousin over a holiday. That means a lot to the Geary side of the family, my dad's side of the family, so I'm looking forward to that. By the time you're listening to it, we'll be back from that, so hope you all had a happy St Patrick's Day, and what we're going to talk about today has nothing to a happy St Patrick's Day, and what we're going to talk about today has nothing to do with St Patrick's Day. We're going to talk about decisions and how making peace with our past decisions is going to help us be a stronger, more decisive decision maker today.
Speaker 1:I was talking to one of my clients the other day and he's the CEO and founder of this company and making a big business decision on his plate and he had a bunch of meetings about it and there were emails thrown around, but he was kicking the can on making the actual decision, taking some real action. So when we dug in, we noticed that his brain was thinking about a past decision that he had made five years ago that was still eating him up inside a little bit. He was holding a grudge against himself and saying that he should have seen this thing coming and he should have made a different decision and it was causing him to not trust himself in the present moment. So we can call it overanalyzing or procrastinating, but really, when we're kicking the can on a decision, we're lacking confidence in ourselves because of something that's happened in the past and today what we're going to learn how to do is make peace with our past decisions so we don't stay stuck today, so we can continue moving forward, making decisions, being decisive, moving ahead in life. So I'm going to give you three tactics to implement whenever you have a decision on your plate, whether it's a big decision or a small decision. If you're stuck on it and you're not making it, if it's something that's been on your to-do list for a while and it's looking at you, but you and your wife aren't having conversations about it, you're not doing the research you were planning on doing. These three steps are going to help you get unstuck and get you moving forward.
Speaker 1:The first one is awareness. We want to start to become aware of the past decisions that our brain grabs onto and thinks about a lot. So when you think about a decision that you're making today, what past decisions come up in your brain, and these can be regrets or things that you question when you think about these past decisions. I know one guy that would ruminate on this class in college that he dropped and he decided not to continue on with and he failed that class. But he was able to find a loophole that it didn't affect his grades and he feels like he took the easy way out and that's a decision that he regrets. And that decision pops up when he's making current decisions. Another guy his mom helped him find his first job and he ruminates on that decision a lot when he's making current decisions because he doesn't want to rely on anybody else. He shouldn't have relied on his mom. So that's. These are stories that these guys are telling themselves about their past. We want to become aware of those stories.
Speaker 1:One that comes up for me a lot is deciding to quit playing football after my sophomore year of college. So I'll find myself thinking about what could have been if I had played the next two years. My career was going well in college football. I was looking to probably be the starting running back the next year, but I decided to quit because, as a 20-year-old, there were certain circumstances happening that I wasn't jazzed up about being on the team anymore. And now my older self is questioning if it's a mistake. What opportunities would have opened up if I kept playing? Would I have had more professional contacts? Would it have looked better on my resume? My cousin played four years in college he's a year younger than me and then he went and played professionally in Europe and I compare myself to him like that would have been pretty freaking cool.
Speaker 1:And I'll notice that this decision creeps up when I'm deciding to commit to new things today and it doesn't stop me anymore, it doesn't freeze me, it doesn't keep me stuck anymore. But one time, one decision back in my past where it was keeping me stuck ruminating on this past decision about football in college was keeping me indecisive, questioning my decision to become a yoga and meditation instructor. So I was deciding should I invest money, should I invest time? And subconsciously my brain was ruminating on this football decision, telling myself that I'm a quitter, I can't commit to anything because I won't finish it, that my brain was going to this past decision. That's awareness. I wasn't aware that my brain was telling me that I'm a quitter, I can't commit to things. But a coach helped me see that story.
Speaker 1:And this is what our brain does. It gets hung up on one thing, usually a negative thing from our past, even though since quitting football, I'd found a bunch of success professionally, made some big moves and commitments in my life, got married, life was good. There were a bunch of success professionally, made some big moves and commitments in my life, got married, life was good. There were a lot of really good decisions that Tommy made, and this one questionable one was holding me back, and this happens to a lot of us. So we can catch ourselves when we're procrastinating on a decision or not taking the action to do the research or getting the info that we need to make the decision, when we're overanalyzing. Catch yourself in that action and then stop for a second and create some awareness in your brain. Your brain's probably subconsciously reminding yourself of a past decision that you still question and you want to bring that into awareness, so it's not running in the background and controlling your current decision making. All right, so that's number one awareness. Number two is language. So what language are you using to describe your past decision, to describe the current decision that you're making?
Speaker 1:I talked about language a little bit in the last podcast and I'm saying it again because it's a really simple thing to start identifying and start changing. Changing and it's extremely important because our language, whether it's spoken or it's in our head, the words and the sentences that cruise through our brain, that we don't say out loud, creates the reality in our life. I think about that Henry Ford quote that goes something along the lines of whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. If you think you can do something, you'll start creating a reality where that thing is possible. That's how powerful language is in a really simplified way. So when we're thinking about decisions, language that we want to be careful of is thinking about decisions as right and wrong. Instead of thinking of decisions as right and wrong, shift that to the best decision at the time I made the decision, or I'm going to make the best decision with the information I have right now. The language that we're using is really important. Instead of thinking of a past decision as wrong or messed up, switch it the best decision I could have made at the time of life that I was in with the current circumstances. Right, it's about lightening the load on yourself a little bit. And another thing to think about here with language is how are you defining the decision that's in front of you?
Speaker 1:The guy that I mentioned at the beginning of the call that was trying to make this business decision. When we first dove into it, he was using words like this is a huge decision. This is a complicated decision. There are big implications for whatever I decide here. While this is true we have big decisions to make there are consequences. On the other end, adding these adjectives like huge, complicated, big creates some unnecessary pressure. We already have a lot of pressure with the decisions that we have to make. If we drop these loaded words, there's a little bit less pressure. We can think a little bit more clearly. So I don't want to discount that we have big decisions to make.
Speaker 1:But you want to check in with that language. When you call something a big decision, really important decision, do you feel more pressure in your shoulders? Does your heart race a little bit? If you just call it I have a decision to make, does that settle your nerves a little bit? It's subtle and it does make a difference, like when I pointed it out with this client. It just got him thinking more creatively. You could see him take a breath and it makes a difference in making a decision, the momentum it takes to keep moving forward.
Speaker 1:So decisions usually aren't binary. There's usually not a right and a wrong way to do things. We want to be careful of right and wrong language. We want to be careful of the brain getting overwhelmed by using descriptive words like huge, big implications, so we can think about these decisions from all angles. All right. So awareness is one, awareness of the past decisions that keep getting mulled over in your brain.
Speaker 1:Language is two how are you describing your current decision? Are you using language like right and wrong, trying to switch that to the best decision? And then the third is confidence. What we're really lacking here, when we're overanalyzing and stuck, is confidence in ourselves. There's this really well-known therapist, terry Real, that says something along the lines of part of confidence is seeing yourself as flawed, as imperfect, and still being able to hold yourself in high regard. We can intellectually tell ourselves like yeah, but hindsight's 20-20. However, we still tend to beat ourselves up. Our brain retroactively analyzes past choices with new information and it makes us think that we should have known better. All right, the self-talk that you have. Are you being hard on yourself or are you giving yourself a little grace? Are you seeing yourself as, yeah, I didn't make the right decision all the time, but I did the best that I could, and I'm telling you that's probably pretty freaking accurate. All things considered, you're a pretty smart guy. You have been pretty dang successful in life and all the decisions that you've made in the past have led you to where you are right now, and you're in a good spot.
Speaker 1:Hearing me say that, notice if your brain believes what I'm saying, or notice if your brain says, no, that's not true. I should be in a different place than I am right now. I could have been more successful. I could have, should have, would have. Whatever your brain starts telling you. Those thoughts, those stories are the ones that we want to start becoming aware of and picking apart. So that's what I got for you guys today. Whatever that thing is on your to-do list that you're procrastinating on, go through these three steps. Start doing the research that's needed, collecting the data, having conversations with the people in your life that you need to have conversations with, and be decisive. Have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
