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
101: Motivation That Doesn’t Run Out
Most men try to push themselves forward with criticism—but that fuel burns out fast.
Episode Highlights:
- Why putting pressure on ourselves feels logical but actually drains energy
- How early success conditions us to rely on fear and shame
- Signs your self-talk is undermining motivation (numbing out, overworking, chasing validation)
- The shift from critic to cheerleader—what it sounds like in real life
Takeaways:
- Notice when your self-talk is critical and learn to reflect on the impact.
- Trade pressure for encouragement—end your day by naming wins, not misses.
- Practice the same positive reinforcement with yourself that you want to give your kids and team.
This week, take stock of your own motivation. Is your critic driving—or your cheerleader?
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 guys? Episode 101. If you listen to this podcast, thank you, appreciate you listening. That's the first thing. The second thing is that if you listen to this podcast, you're probably listening to it because you want to grow.
Speaker 1:You have some goals that you want to hit. You have some changes you want to make in life, things that are going to make you be a better man. Maybe it's more patience and calm with your family. You want to be more healthy. You got some fitness goals to hit. Maybe you want to make more money or make a career change, learn how to be a better leader at work, a better husband, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:You listen to this podcast, you listen to content like this. You got goals that you want to hit and in order to get to any goal, we need motivation and a lot of the time. It's easy to start a goal, it's easy to want something new, maybe make a slight change, but the fire runs out. The excitement, the motivation stops and it's hard to stay motivated in order to see the real change you want in the long term, and that's what we're going to talk about on the podcast today how to create lasting motivation, motivation that can last the long haul. And I see a lot of guys, when they're procrastinating on the change they want to make or prioritizing other things, try to restart with the wrong motivation. So what is motivation? Motivation comes from the inside and it comes from an inner voice, a voice that is talking to ourself. We try to motivate ourselves and what we get wrong is that we speak negatively towards ourself, and I'm going to call this negative voice that's in our head the internal critic or the inner critic. And this inner critic, it's trying to help us, it's trying to push us forward and motivate us. However, it's actually not the right motivation to use.
Speaker 1:So I was talking to a guy who his anger is getting in the way of having good relationships with his kids and he's got two teenagers and his frustrations just getting the best of them Goes zero to a hundred sometimes, and when he's telling me about this, he's telling me how much he's screwing up, how he's messing up his relationship with his kids. He told me the story about how his daughter was in the kitchen right before dinner and she said she's not eating dinner with the family. She slammed the refrigerator door and he flipped out, said some words he wished he could take back and as soon as he was saying them he knew he was screwing up. Come on, man, what are you doing? You're screwing up your relationship with the kids. You can't act this way. You're just messing everything up.
Speaker 1:That's an internal critic and it seems helpful. It seems logical, like, yeah, that's not how you want to act. You should have a voice inside checking you, letting you know that that's not how you want to behave. However, when that voice is persistent and there all the time, it wears you down, it doesn't create motivation. It actually slows you down.
Speaker 1:If you wanted to ride a horse from Chicago to New York and you start riding and you whip the horse to get going and you keep whipping the horse to get it moving, that's that inner critic whipping you, telling you you got to go better, you got to go harder, you shouldn't slow down, keep going, keep whipping that horse. By the time you get to Cleveland, that horse is going to be pretty freaking beat up and he's either going to be injured and stop, not able to go any further. Or he's going to be like and stop, not able to go any further. Or he's going to be like fuck you, stop whipping me, I quit. That's what an internal critic can do. It can beat us up so much that we're exhausted that we don't want to go any further. In this analogy, we're the horse, we're the mechanism that wants to achieve the goal, that wants to get to the end, and the inner critic is the rider, the one with the whip. So where do you notice you're being too hard on yourself? The inner critic can be sneaky. It's the voice at the end of the day that tells you you didn't get enough done. You should have got more done. It's not looking at your wins, it's looking at the things that you missed for the day. Sometimes that voice shows up as you should have been able to do this, this should be easier, just get it done.
Speaker 1:I have a client that he gets a lot of his business from social media networking referrals via social media and he wasn't posting as much as he wanted to. So we were setting some goals on getting more posts out and we talked the next session. He didn't hit those goals and when I checked in with him on it, he had that voice inside telling him this should be easy, I should just be able to do it. Got to pause there for a second. Our thoughts, which is another way to say our internal monologues, our internal self-talk, create our emotions, drive the actions that we're going to take. So if we check in with those thoughts, I just got to do it, it's easy. I should just be able to do this quick. What kind of energy does that bring? Oh, it feels like pressure Feels rushed. When there's constant pressure we get squished. We can't operate properly under pressure all of the time.
Speaker 1:Now what I found is that this inner critic was really helpful in the first half of our life. Pushing ourself harder helped us in school to maybe get better grades or succeed and graduate. It helped us early in our career to get promotions, to get more money and in sports. Physically, that inner push, putting pressure on ourself, it helps. Then in our mid-30s, 40s, the pressure that inner critic becomes too much and that type of motivation wears off.
Speaker 1:Back to that client that was working on his anger reactions and having more calmness, more patience, when I pointed out to him that his critical self-talk was putting pressure on him, was creating this shame cycle of him just beating himself up, telling him he's not good enough. I asked him where did it come from? How long has that voice been there? And he was like oh, forever. And I was like tell me more. And he was like well, that's my dad's voice.
Speaker 1:A lot of the time our internal critic comes from one of the authority figures early in life Parents, coaches, maybe teachers. This guy remembers a football game when he was a freshman in high school and he got beat deep three times. He was a defensive back and right after the game, as he came off the field, his dad just told him all the things he did wrong, how he screwed up, and not in a hating way. But the things he did wrong, how he screwed up and not in a hating way. But letting him know that he wasn't doing a good job and how we're spoken to as kids becomes our internal self-talk. That's why the internal critic's there. It's been there for a long time and it's been helpful at times. So of course it wants a seat at the table and it wants to keep control over trying to motivate us because it's worked in the past.
Speaker 1:But as we move through life and the inner critic still there trying to whip us forward, it starts to wear on us and it becomes less motivating and more detrimental, because continuously telling ourselves that we're not doing enough, we need to do it quicker we should be able to figure this out we start losing respect for ourself. We're shaming ourself over and over respect for ourself. We're shaming ourself over and over, and so signs that your internal critic might be too loud are numbing out behaviors. So if you're not taking great care of yourself, if you're overeating, late night snacking, drinking too much, not getting your workouts in, not prioritizing your time, if you're overworking and really trying to get as much done as possible, seeking that external validation as an indicator that you're doing a good job, those are signs that the inner critic is in charge behind the scenes. And what's happening here, when we stop taking care of ourself, is that we're not respecting ourself, we're not liking ourself and we don't take care of things we don't like. We don't take care of things we don't respect. So it's important to do some self-reflection and notice the internal critic inside of you.
Speaker 1:You might even think the internal critic's helpful, but you want to question it. Where is it helping? Where isn't it helping? Get aware of your internal critic. We all have them. I promise you there's some internal critic in there. Them, I promise you there's some internal critic in there. And then, once we're aware, we want to switch the type of motivation. So if motivation is our fuel to drive our goals, we want to switch the type of fuel. So internal critic is diesel. We want to switch to unleaded. And unleaded is an internal cheerleader, an internal voice that's a little more compassionate. It's telling you you're doing a good job. It's telling you that you're a good person, you're doing enough right now.
Speaker 1:When I was coaching the guy that was trying to manage his temper and his reactions I'm going to come back to him again Remember he had this experience when he was 14, playing football. His dad was giving him a lot of criticism after he made some mistakes on the field, given him a lot of criticism after he made some mistakes on the field. When I asked him, what did that 14-year-old kid that was playing football that made a few mistakes, what did he need to hear after the game? And he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure what the kid needed to hear and I offered what if someone came up to him and said hey, you made some mistakes, but you're okay, I still love you? And as soon as I said that, there was relief and that's the type of motivation that we want to create and it almost sounds too soft.
Speaker 1:A lot of the guys will be like whoa well, if I have that feeling of relaxed, if I have that feeling of everything's okay right now, I'm good, then I won't have the fire to move forward, then I won't have the fire to go after goals. And that's totally not true. I've coached enough men, I've done enough work on myself that when I'm beating myself up and telling myself I'm not doing good enough, I get worn out and I am not as productive as I want to be, I'm not as helpful to the people in my life, I'm not as happy moving around life. But when I have compassion for myself, when I'm cheering myself on, that's when I can really do my best work and that motivation turns into confidence, turns into excitement and less pressure. So that's the work.
Speaker 1:It's recognizing your internal critic and it's switching that internal critic to more of a cheerleader, more of someone that loves you for who you are and is ready to grow from there. And what a lot of us want is we want to hear that from other people. We want our wife to tell us we're doing a good job. We want our kids to thank us for things. It's great getting that praise externally, but when we rely on it, when the internal critic only quiets down when external people tell us we're doing a good job or we get a promotion or we make more money, if we only wait on those things, the internal critic's never going to stop because it's never enough for the internal critic. So we have to cultivate an internal cheerleader that can look at our day and tell ourselves at the end of the day like look at this win, look at this win, look at this win. You missed some things, no problem, and you did a lot, you did a good job. That's what we want to create. That's what we want to be motivated from right.
Speaker 1:If life is that trip from Chicago to New York on a horse, sometimes we put some pressure on and whip to get going, and other times we pet the horse a little bit and say, hey, buddy, you look beautiful, you look great, you're doing an awesome job. Encourage that horse. That's how we want to encourage our kids. That's how we'd like to encourage our employees, with some positive reinforcement, and change happens with us first. If we can positively encourage ourself, then we're going to be able to look around us in the world and recognize in other people that they're trying their best, they're doing a good job. Let me be their cheerleader also. So we work on ourselves, work on your internal critic, turn it into a cheerleader and then spread that lightness, that love, that fiery motivation to the rest of the people in your life. All right, that's what I got for you guys this week. Hope you have an awesome one and I'll catch you next time you.
