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
107: A Tool to Make Better Decisions
Most men make decisions out of convenience or pressure—and end up with regret or resentment.
Highlights:
• The difference between working in your life versus working on it
• Why most men lose purpose—and drift into distraction
• How a North Star makes big decisions easier
• The three questions to define your North Star: values, impact, and energizers
• How a simple North Star gives you clarity when tough choices show up
• Why alignment—not hustle—creates steadiness at home
• A client story using his North Star to pass on a tempting opportunity
Takeaways:
• Block real “strategy time” for your life the same way you do for work
• Build your filter before the big decisions show up
• Check your week: Did your actions match the man you say you want to be?
Listen to the episode, then take a morning to define your North Star. Your kids and your wife will feel the difference when your decisions start lining up with who you want to be.
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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 107. Hope you are doing well today. Lately, I have been thinking about working on my business versus in my business. This is an idea, it's probably not revolutionary, but I heard it from one of my coaches. Working on your business is thinking strategically. It's looking future forward. It's scaling, it's sales and marketing. Working in your business is servicing your clients. It's the reactive things that have to happen on a daily basis. And this isn't just for business owners. This is if you have a job and you work within an organization. Are you working on the day-to-day stuff or are you thinking strategically long term and having that vision and that purpose in mind? And it's got to be a balance. You got to do both. And that's really what I've been trying to think about for me lately. I talked about it on a few podcasts ago. Lifestyle has changed a little bit with Brenda getting a job at a university and she has to be in the office. So with me, I'm more focused with my time because I have a little more household responsibilities. And the business is growing. My client list and the group trips that I'm running, they take a lot of my focus, and that's working in my business, serving my clients, planning these trips, executing these trips. I have less time to work because my mornings are kind of with the girls, and then my daughter gets home at 4:15. I can still work when she gets home, but it's not the same because I'm getting interrupted by the neighbor kids cruising around and everything like that. So I really have to schedule my time so I am efficient with getting that service part of my business in and making time to work on my business. When you work on your business, I've talked about the Eisenhower matrix before. It's a time management prioritizing tool. And there's four quadrants, and one of the quadrants is important tasks, but not urgent. Those are usually the working on your business tasks. How are you growing sales and marketing? How are you scaling your business? What's the overall vision? What processes do you have to put in place to make yourself more efficient? Where do you need to delegate those kinds of questions and strategic thinking that you need to do, whether you're a business owner or you work within an organization? You got to schedule time for that. Right now, for me, working on my business, thinking long-term strategically is growing this podcast, figuring out how to get more exposure, more downloads, more reviews, because I get awesome feedback from you guys that are listening. I just had an email from a guy that said, Hey, listen to the recent podcast, really good stuff, man. It's helping me put things in perspective, appreciate what you're doing, keep going. That kind of feedback gets me excited and makes me think, how can I get this information out to more men? So right now that's working on my business for me. And what you have to do with these kinds of tasks is schedule time for it. I work with all my one-on-one clients Tuesday through Thursday. Monday and Friday, I don't take any calls. That's creative and strategic thinking time. So that's what I've been thinking about mainly business-wise lately. And I think this relates directly to our life. That's what I want to talk about today is are you working in your life or are you working on your life? Most of us are working in our business instead of on our business. So if we're already stuck working in our business, then we leave and life throws kids' activities at us and we're cleaning the kitchen three times every night, it's hard to work on our life. And our purpose becomes getting through the day-to-day. We lose sense of a greater purpose. And I was thinking about this because as I'm building the podcast out a little bit for more of a reach, I went back and listened to the first episode of this podcast. And the episode is called What is a Durable Dad? First thing is that a durable dad knows what he stands for and his actions align with it. We want to know what we stand for because when a man doesn't have a greater purpose, he isn't motivated to work on himself. Victor Frankel, the Holocaust survivor, wrote Man's Search for Meaning, says a man who lacks purpose distracts himself with pleasure. We start gaining weight, we get into bad habits, we turn money and making more money into our purpose, and then we overwork and we stress a lot about work. One of my clients said he feels like he's working hard, but not proactively getting anywhere in life. He's not doing anything in an organized way, he's not aligning with his priorities. When we don't have a greater purpose, we start asking ourselves: Am I being a good dad? Am I being the man that I want to be? And am I setting a good example for my kids? So the first thing you have to do to work on your life is to solidify your purpose. And you can do this by creating a North Star. A North Star is a statement that gives you purpose, it keeps you on track. It's a guardrail, it's a guide. And it's not a huge thing. It's actually really easy to come up with. In different parts of life, you might have different North Stars. I'm gonna walk you through one that I did with a client recently. It was a new client. He was the one that said he's working really hard, but not proactively getting his life done. When you work on your North Star, you ask yourself a few questions. And the first question is a values question. What do you want your kids to learn from watching you? For this client, he wanted his kids to learn from him resilience, overcoming challenges. He wanted to show them that there isn't a challenge you can't beat. And he wants to show them how to take initiative. He doesn't want to just wait around for a task to be handed to him. He wants to be proactive about it. And really, he was focused on being more proactive and taking initiative in family stuff. He's been wanting to organize the family calendar for a while, and he noticed he's kind of waiting for his wife to do it, and that was something he wanted to take initiative on. The second question is impact. What kind of impact do you want? If you zoomed out 20 years, what would you want your family to say about how you showed up as a man? When I asked my client this question, his mind went to the impact that his father-in-law has had on him. He said that he was an electrical engineer and he always just woke up ready to attack the day. And he never wanted more in life. He was content with what he had. And that really landed with him. He said he was a dignified man. And when we talked about what he would want his kids to say about him, he said that in 20 years, he hopes his kids say that dad had time for me. Dad played with me, that dad always worked hard, but he always had time for me. That's what he wanted to hear from his kids. So this is all gonna be building into his North Star, the values, the impact, and then you check in on what fills you up, what lights you up. So you ask, when do you feel most proud of the actions you put into the world? For this guy, it was when he runs, when he works out. He gets super energized, super fired up, and he likes that energy. And when we dove into it a little, he also noticed that this pumped up energy from working out is awesome for his W-2 or if he's got house projects to do, but it's not always the best energy when it's time to connect with his kids or connect with his wife. Sometimes it's a little too high. But conversely to this running energy that he loves, this question brought up how he coached his daughters volleyball recently, and that it was something that he really didn't want to do because he thought he had too much work going on, but he decided to commit to it. And when he was reflecting on the season, he was like, I was kind of the coach that didn't have to know the X's and O's. I just made it fun. And watching the kids grow, this one girl couldn't serve a ball at the beginning of the season, seeing her gain confidence and just being there for the girls, that's what lit him up and he felt accomplished. So that was another key into possibly his North Star. So we asked those three questions: a values question, an impact question, uh energy question. And this is what he came up with. This is what we came up with together. His North Star is to lead with integrity, stay calm and present, grow others, and build connection with my family. So part of that is a little vague, but I'm gonna tell you how he used it in a second. But this is working on your life. This is stepping back, working on your life, getting strategic. It took about 30 minutes for us to do. You could probably try doing it with an AI. It's a good exercise to do with your wife. When him and I were working on it together, I was helping organize his thoughts. That's what a life coach does. We help you get focused on the man that you want to be. And I like doing this exercise with guys because then once we have the North Star, we can use it for accountability, for checking in, as a filter to run decisions through. And when we do our weekly recap, are you aligned with your North Star? What's the plan of attack for the next week? Is it aligned with your North Star? And when you start living in alignment with your North Star, that's when you start to really feel purpose. When you start to feel fulfilled, it's not this huge grand thing. It's how you incorporate your values into your day-to-day. So for this guy, lead with integrity, stay calm and present, grow others, build connection with his family. A few weeks later, he was weighing this decision to invest in this new real estate opportunity that he had. And it was with a guy that he had worked together with before and they work really well together, but he wasn't sure if it was the right decision. So we ran it through his North Star. Will this choice make him more steady and present, or will it distract him and overwhelm him? Will this deepen connection and trust with his family and with his wife or not? The answer to those two questions made it clear that he didn't have room to prioritize it right now. It did align with other parts of his North Star, with the growth part, with integrity. However, not the full North Star. And he decided to pass on this, even though it was hard, even though he was saying no to a guy that they work really well together, and he felt like he was maybe disappointing him. But when he said no, he knew he was living in alignment with what was important to him. And the guy that he said no to, he actually respected him for making that decision. He appreciated how thoughtful he was about that decision. All right, so are you working in your life or are you working on your life? It's gotta be both. It's not one or the other, but we gotta find time to work on our life because if we don't, we lose purpose. And when a man loses purpose, he loses motivation. And as Victor Frankel said, he distracts himself with pleasure. So take a morning off of work or to ask your wife to have a Sunday morning by yourself and work on your North Star. Ask yourself these questions. It's not easy to find this time. I'm I know that we're all busy, and this needs to be a priority because your kids are watching you, and when they see a dad that's got purpose and excitement and vigor in his life, that's gonna benefit them. All right, thanks for listening. If you guys like the podcast, go follow it, download it, review it. I appreciate it, and I hope you have an awesome week.
