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
100: Family Trips Aren’t Vacations
Family trips aren’t vacations. They’re rollercoasters—packed with logistics, too many personalities, and unmet expectations.
In this episode, we dive into what a request for chips can reveal about expectations, irritation, and presence.
Plus, the creative shift behind the podcast, and what it means to keep showing up as a dad, husband, and creator when life changes.
Highlights:
- The difference between a vacation and a family trip
- Why unmet expectations lead to frustration
- Coaching insight: how to adjust your mindset before a trip
- A new lens for managing energy, responsibility, and gratitude
Take Action:
Before your next trip (or even your next weekend), pause and check your expectations. Are they helping or hurting how you show up?
Stop Losing Your Temper Road Map
This roadmap will teach you how to have more patience.
To give your kids more time and attention.
Anger isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Learn how to manage it so it doesn't get the best of you.
https://www.tommygcoaching.com/roadmap
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 100, feels pretty cool to say For you guys that listen to the podcast often. You might notice that this episode is a few weeks delayed. There's good reason behind it.
Speaker 1:There have been some changes in the Geary household. My wife, brenda, got a new job and it's at a university. It's a marketing position in their health and wellness department and Brenda's a health and productivity coach. She's owned her own creative agency for the last 10 years, so this job just really aligned with a lot of what Brenda does, who Brenda is. So we decided that she was going to take it and it's been about a month and she's really been enjoying it and with this move it takes her away from this business. Brenda's always behind the scenes. She does copywriting for our social, for our email newsletters, all the branding for Tommy G Coaching. With this podcast, she edits, she produces the episodes. Her and I create the episodes together.
Speaker 1:Why is this episode delayed? That's one of the big changes. The other thing is that with her new job there's a change in household responsibilities around here, so she's at the office from eight to five. The summer schedules that's a lot more of the kids logistics on me. So I've prioritized that dad role. Week to week Things are changing for the girls with camps and where they're going and their home a few days a week. So when you say yes to new responsibilities, you usually have to say no to current tasks that are on your list. So that's the other reason for the delay is that I'm prioritizing the dad stuff. I'm prioritizing my one-on-one clients and the Grand Canyon group that's traveling in October. We're still doing training and we meet weekly for our calls. When I look at my schedule and the time I have to dedicate to work right now I don't have that creative, focused time. So that's the update on the Geary household. What's going on behind the scenes here?
Speaker 1:And for this 100th episode, I was thinking about maybe sharing my reflections of what I've learned along the way, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to share one thing though, and that's more about Brenda leaving is that, thinking about these hundred episodes and that we did almost all of the first 99 together, that it brought up some emotion in me and you know we had a ton of fun doing research together and high-fiving when we nailed episodes. We laughed at each other when I would stutter and I've done the last three episodes with just me and I'm working with a new creative director, chatgpt, and I've taken a few webinars. I've learned some really good prompts, built a custom GPT and my GPT and I are working well together. Built a custom GPT and my GPT and I are working well together, and it's totally different than how Brenda and I work together. And I'll give you a quick example.
Speaker 1:A few months ago I was just banging my head against the wall with trying to record and just wasn't feeling confident about it, and she suggested that I take my microphone, meet her in the living room and we'd both have mics, turn them on and we would talk out the episode and the outline and everything like that. So we did it and it worked. I started flowing with my words. We had a really good conversation, the ideas came together and I was able to record. To have a creative director like that that can pull the creativity out of you is really valuable and I was really lucky to have her for all these episodes and I know that I still have her and we'll still work together. But that was part of my reflection that I had a badass creative director that was also my wife Pretty lucky. So that was one of the things that came out of my reflection from the first hundred episodes. Finding gratitude in the process is always helpful, especially when there's also a lot Moving ahead.
Speaker 1:On today's episode, we're going to talk about expectations, and the reason this came up was because I was talking to a client that had just got back from a family trip and he was in the airport on his way home, kind of moving quick. He wanted to get home, he wanted some peace and quiet and while they were walking to the gate his son asked for a bag of chips. My client snapped back with a quick no, just keep moving. As he said it, he also noticed that he was being a jerk about this. So that's the self-awareness we want. He knew that the family trip was exhausting. There was a lot of fun, but he was with his in-laws for part of it, he was with his parents at his parents' lake house for part of it and there were a bunch of different events that happened. So he was kind of at wit's end on his way home, buy a bag of chips and he noticed that that pissed him off. They just ate before they got to the airport. Chips are so much more expensive at these stores, frustration building inside and he stayed quiet because he also knew that kids get hungry. Kids need snacks and he realized that he doesn't really care about the $2 extra that chips are. Why was he frustrated? The first thing we noticed was that it didn't start at the airport. He was getting agitated and irritated.
Speaker 1:Off and on through this family trip that he was on. He said he was never able to just chill, felt like he was always on throughout the whole trip. He was helping his parents with lawn maintenance that they can't do anymore because they're a little older. He also had a bunch of fun things that were going on. They did a pickleball tournament with his cousins and uncles and aunts. They played a bunch of different yard games, and that drains the energy too. Played a bunch of different yard games and that drains the energy too.
Speaker 1:So by the time he gets to the airport he's feeling exhausted. And I asked him like what if you went into this trip expecting it to be exhausting and he kind of took a sigh of relief and he was like, yeah, if I expected to be exhausted and irritated, I think I would have flowed with all of it a little bit better. I would have rolled with some of the things that happened. He had an expectation that there was going to be some chill time, that he was going to get to relax, and that expectation wasn't met. When expectations aren't met, we tend to get frustrated. Our expectations shape our experience. He was hoping for some time to relax and when that didn't happen, that's when he started to get frustrated and irritated.
Speaker 1:Our brain is always anticipating the future, what's going to happen, and we solidify expectations how we want events to go, how we want people to act. I talk about playbooks. It's one of the coaching tools that I use in my sessions and I've explained on this podcast. Playbooks are the expectations that we have for other people, how we want them to follow our playbook, and the reality is is we don't control other people and other people don't follow our playbooks. Instead of getting frustrated when our expectations aren't met, we can adjust our expectations, but before we adjust them, we have to become aware of them. We have to unpack what our expectations are For me, thinking about creating the podcast with Brenda, all these episodes we've created together when we got stuck, or I got frustrated, pissed off with the process, and I looked at my frustration.
Speaker 1:Why am I got frustrated, pissed off with the process and I looked at my frustration. Why am I getting frustrated? It was because I expected the creative process to be fun. I expected this to be easy. We should be able to flow. And then, when the creative process isn't easy and it isn't fun, tommy started to get frustrated, started to take feedback personally instead of letting the creative process flow, because creating something, doing something new, isn't supposed to be easy. There's always resistance to start writing something. If you're going to start working out, it doesn't have to be exciting right away. There's going to be some discomfort. So identify your expectations. So my client was expecting to have some chill, relaxing time on the trip. All right, we're aware of that. So the next thing we want to do is adjust our expectations.
Speaker 1:I've been calling this trip that my client took a family trip. Family trips are different than vacations. We think vacation, think of it as a kid's roller coaster there's ups and downs, but it's pretty smooth. It's pretty steady, pretty chill. That's vacation, a family trip, when we're planning logistics for travel, when we're moving through airports with our family, when we're hanging out with our parents, our in-laws, extended family. Those aren't kiddie roller coasters. Those are usually the big roller coasters with the loop-de-loops and the twists and the big drops, and there's highs and lows on family trips. So instead of expecting a kiddie rollercoaster, we can shift and expect the big rollercoaster, this family trip. There's going to be highs, there's going to be lows. I'm supposed to be exhausted at times. That's just how we're going into it.
Speaker 1:So, for these family trips, acknowledge your expectations, shift your expectations. And then the other thing is to remember why you're going on the trip. You decided to hop on the big roller coaster. Why are you going on this family trip? You're a family man. You want your kids to have good relationships with their cousins. You want them to make memories, you want to spend time with your parents while they're getting older. There's good reason behind why you're doing what you're doing and it's helpful to remember that on these trips. There's good reason behind why you're doing what you're doing and it's helpful to remember that on these trips. All right, so it's the end of July, you might have some more family trips coming up this year before the school year starts. Take these tips, use them. If you don't have any family trips, bookmark this episode and come back when the holidays start, because it'll be helpful at that time too. And that's what I got for you guys today, episode 100. Hope you enjoyed it, hope you have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
