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
099: Productivity is an Inner Game
Feeling behind leads to reactive days, scattered focus, and that constant low-level stress that won’t let up. This episode breaks down a real-world strategy to reset that cycle and get back in control.
Inside, you’ll hear how one executive went from spiraling through stress to calmly attacking his day—by shifting his mindset and using a simple 4-step planning process.
This isn’t about hustle or hacks. It’s about getting grounded, clear, and intentional when life is full.
What you’ll learn:
- How your thoughts shape your productivity
- A proven planning method to calm your mind
- Why stress lingers without a clear path forward
You want to get back into shape, but the gym isn’t motivating.
You need an extra push to lock in your diet and exercise—something to train for.
This is it. Check out the details - http//:www.tommygcoacing.com/ocr
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 99, Durable Dad Podcast.
Speaker 1:Today, we are going to talk about productivity being efficient. With our time, I'm going to dive into an example. This example with my client happens a lot and this is what good, solid coaching sessions can be like. So when we started talking this guy, he's an executive at the company and he had a lot of travel coming up that week. He was also coaching his kids' teams and they had recently hired a new person. Add that all on to the normal day-to-day stuff that he's already responsible for and he was just feeling overwhelmed and he was thinking that he was behind. And that's where we started the session. So I asked him when you're here in this place feeling stressed, thinking that you have a lot going on and that you're behind, what do your actions look like? And we kind of dove into those which was showing up a few minutes late to every meeting, letting meetings run over the time allotted for that meeting. He was using his calendar. But when we looked at it together it was overbooked, double booked. There was no room in there for transitions in between tasks. So there were other actions, different buffering and scrolling. There was also checking data, like financials within his business, without taking action with that data, just going in checking the numbers to check the numbers. It's passive action. It's not actually creating something new, driving ahead. So if we put this in the thinking cycle and if you guys remember the thinking cycle I talk about it a lot on the podcast Our thoughts, which are sentences in our brain, their opinions, their perspectives, they're not the truth.
Speaker 1:Those thoughts create an emotion inside of our body. An emotion is energy, emotions are sensations that move through our body. Those emotions fuel our actions, the actions we take, the actions we don't take. And this is a cycle because those actions start to prove our thoughts true. They create our reality around us. So this guy is thinking I'm behind, there's a lot going on. Those are thoughts, those are perspectives, not the total truth. The truth are the facts Travel he has coming up, the coaching that he's doing for his kids, the new hire that he has, the tasks on his to-do list. Those are the facts. The story, the thought he has is I'm behind.
Speaker 1:And when he's thinking that he feels overwhelmed, he feels stressed. Those are the emotions, that's the energy, and when he's feeling that way, he does all the actions that we talked about, and all those actions that we talked about the showing up late, the overbooking himself lead him to staying behind. They don't get him ahead, they don't make him productive. So he's caught in this cycle. I get it. We all get stuck in this overwhelmed stress and then we don't prioritize and we don't focus.
Speaker 1:Well, I could empathize with him in this coaching session. He's a business owner, he has three kids, he manages his house with his wife because his wife also works. So there's a lot in common. But if I just empathize with him, it would just be two dudes complaining about life, and that's not helpful. That's not where growth happens. If we just complain about external circumstances and everything we have going on, we're not growing, because growth is an internal game. It takes looking at what you control and changing that. So when I say it's an internal game, thanks for watching Instead of empathizing, what I pointed out was that he's choosing to stay in overwhelm and stress.
Speaker 1:And when I said that, he was like oh okay, my circumstances aren't changing so I need a new approach. The realization that your life is full and it probably always will be full, it's actually a liberating feeling. It means that you can stop waiting for the chaos to end. You don't have to wait till my plate clears a little bit to do the next thing. The new approach that this guy pointed out is what we started to work on in the session and that's what I want to walk you guys through, because the power here to break that cycle is to stop, pause and plan ahead. Our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that makes us human, it's the part of our brain that can think about the future and use our past to plan better in the future, only works if we get out of the stress and we get out of the overwhelm. So you got to stop and that's, I think, what is a huge benefit to some of the coaching sessions that guys have with me.
Speaker 1:When guys coach with me, we start off. We're coaching three times a month and we're doing it for six months to a year and in those sessions they can look differently. But these planning sessions, when guys show up with a shit ton on their plate and they stressed and overwhelmed and they're like all right, I need to break this. This is what we do. So here's the process we write down everything you have to do and that's everything from business to personal stuff, to family stuff, all those obligations that you have. You write them all down and in the session I'll write them down for the guys and I'll press with some questions to make sure we're getting everything out of our brain and onto paper. And that already starts to slow things down a little bit. Our brain isn't overthinking as much because it's on a list. Next, next to each of those items, you're going to write the next step, the next immediate thing that has to happen. And that's because some of these things on our to-do list can be really big projects and they can have a lot of steps to completion.
Speaker 1:And if we just leave it vague with, for this guy it was the next round of fundraising. He was starting to line up the next round of fundraising for his company and that task seems very ominous. So what are the next steps? And when I asked him ominous, so what are the next steps? And when I asked him, he said figuring out the calculation to find the right price per share and then doing the math on that and sending it to my financial guy. So that's actually three different steps, but all perfect to identify. At least we know what the next three steps are.
Speaker 1:And you go and you do that for every item on the list. What's the next step? Then you write down the amount of time each of those steps are going to take as to fill the time available for its completion. This is why we wait to the last minute to get a project done. The amount of time that we give ourself to work on a project, our work's gonna fill up that full time. So when I say, write how much time each of those steps are gonna take, if you don't know, guess and you will work as hard as you can to finish it within that amount of time. Okay, so those are the First three steps. Write it everything down next to each item, write the immediate next step and then, next to that, write how much time each of those steps are going to take. So him and I are doing this in the session. We're strategically thinking, and then we look at that list and we pick the first thing that he wants to get done.
Speaker 1:I talked about the Eisenhower matrix a few weeks ago on the podcast. What's the important and urgent thing that needs to happen? And we look at that priority and we put it on our calendar. What time are you going to do it? Then we look at the next thing what time are you going to do it? And we put it on the calendar. So you choose what things off of that list you're going to work on and you put it on your calendar so you can see whether or not it's feasible. We can only get so much done in a day. Let's make sure that the tasks we're going to complete for the day match up with the amount of time that we have in the day amount of time that we have in the day. So that's the process and at the end of that process, you can do this for your day. You can do this for the next 48 hours. You can do this for the next week. In this case, we just did it for the rest of the day. I think our session was at 11 in the morning. He was in central time, so he was at 10 am, so we just did it for the rest of the day. As soon as you're done with this process.
Speaker 1:Your thinking cycle has changed. It's actually been changing the whole time. You've been thinking Ever since you paused. You broke that first cycle, but we do this and I asked him like how you feeling, man? And he was like I feel good, I feel calm and focused, like ready to go, let's do this. Awesome why? Because I've got a plan, like I feel like I'm in control. New emotions, new thoughts. The new thoughts, if you didn't catch them, are I've got a plan, I'm in control. New emotions, clear, confident, focused, ready, determined. All right, he just chose not to stay in the overwhelmed cycle. He decided to stop, pause, break the cycle plan and create a brand new cycle that's going to be productive, that's going to get him ahead.
Speaker 1:You guys can all do this.
Speaker 1:You can spend 20 minutes doing this at the beginning of your day or at the end of the day, and it changes how you operate If obstacles come up.
Speaker 1:We talked about it. It was only 10 am when he set this calendar up. What happens when you get an email from a client that needs something immediately? What happens when one of your employees has something that comes up? He said it's all good, I'll stay focused, I got a plan. I'm gonna stick to the plan. It becomes a mantra and kind of side note that I didn't talk about. In that calendar we build in some time for those distractions 30 minutes for things that come up. So you put that towards the end of your day. You stick with your calendar throughout the day. Anything that comes up tries to distract you. You just know later you'll have time to address it. So he's ready to address any of the obstacles that come his way. He's feeling good, he's ready to go, and this applies to work, it applies to your personal life, your health, it applies to your family time.
Speaker 1:We got to stop, pause, use that prefrontal cortex to plan our future, to plan how we're going to crush the day. If you can build this habit, you're going to find clarity in the chaos of life. There is so much shit happening in life, good and bad. If you can pause and plan, the constant stress that some of us feel is going to subside and you're going to be in control. You're going to be running the show. You're going to be controlling your thinking cycles. You're not going to spin and stay in that spinning, overwhelmed state. All right, that's what I got for you guys today those steps are. Write everything down, identify the immediate next step, write how long each of those steps are going to take and then put it on your calendar. Set reasonable expectations for yourself and then attack your calendar. All right, have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
