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
110: Drop the Pressure in 2026
If you don’t pause to review your year, you don’t actually start a new one—you just drag old pressure forward. You already review your business. Numbers. Calendars. What worked and what didn’t.
This episode shows you how to apply that same discipline to your life—so your time, energy, and attention are spent where they matter most.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why skipping a personal review causes you to repeat the same patterns
- How pressure-based goals quietly drain energy and motivation
- Using photos as data to reconnect with what actually mattered last year
- What your calendar reveals about stress, relationships, and priorities
- A four-step year-end review you can complete in one sitting
- How reflection creates vision—and why vision changes how you show up at home
Practical takeaways:
- Block two uninterrupted hours and treat your life like you treat your business
- Use photos and calendar entries as information, not nostalgia
- Set goals from clarity and appreciation, not urgency or scarcity
- If you want 2026 to feel different, you have to look back before you move forward.
- Drop the pressure. Get clear. Then lead your year on purpose.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE YEAR END REVIEW - drop your email and get the step by step process I've used to optimize my life.
This episode is especially relevant for men focused on leadership—at work, at home, and in their community. Strong men’s leadership isn’t about doing more or pushing harder. It’s about clarity, self-awareness, and making intentional decisions with your time and energy.
When a man leads himself well, he leads his family better and shows up with steadiness at work. The year-end review process shared here helps men step out of reactive leadership and into grounded, intentional leadership.
It’s a practical tool for fathers, husbands, and high-performing professionals who want to reduce stress, strengthen their marriage, and model healthy leadership for their kids. Leadership starts with reflection—and this is where it begins.
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. Alright, 2026, happy new year. Today is episode 110. Alright, that is my daughter who is homesick from school today. And she's rollerblading out of here. 2026, first podcast of the year. What I want to give to you today is a tool that's going to make 2026 an intentional, very awesome year. And that tool is a year-end review. So we do this in business. We review our year, we review our numbers, we review our travel calendars, and we see what worked, what didn't. We do this so we can plan and inform our year moving ahead. What we don't do is we don't review our personal life. We don't review the data that has happened the last 365 days of 2025 so we can live a new year with new direction and making sure that we're spending our time where we need to be spending our time. So just like we review our business to make better business decisions, we want to review our life to make better life decisions. And the way to do this is a year-end review. When I talk about a year-end review, a lot of guys will say they don't have time for it. So the year-end review that I do takes about two hours. That excuse that you don't have time for a year-end review, it's a little backwards because if you don't do a year-end review, you start wasting time. You start wasting energy and you fall back into your old habits when you skip the year-end review process. Because what you do is you start setting goals from pressure, you start setting goals from things that you missed or scarcity. And I'll tell you more about what I mean by that, because we don't want to set goals from scarcity or thinking that we need to do more. I've done podcasts on this before when we move through life trying to drive forward from pressure. That pressure just builds, builds, and builds, and it doesn't give us the momentum and the high energy that we need to be awesome men. You do have time for this. You make time for a year-end review. And the second thing a lot of guys will say is that they don't know where to start, which totally makes sense. If you've never done a year-end review before, it's something new. And of course, you don't know how to do it, you don't know where to go. And anything new, there's gonna be some resistance to. So I am giving you a year-end review process. That's what I'm doing right now. So you're gonna listen to this podcast, and then you can go back and listen to it again as you go through your year-end review. In the show notes is gonna be a link to the year-end review process that I use. This is something I've used for the last 10 years. My wife also uses it, and we've both refined it to make it more concise, to make it shorter, because it does take two hours. And the first time I did a year-on review, I didn't have kids, and I did it through this online course, and it took a whole day, and that's a lot harder to find than two hours. So, this process, you're gonna go into the show notes, you can click on it, and it's gonna be a guide to take you step by step through a year-on review process. And it's I've been taking my clients through it, I've done workshops on this, and it works. So you have time for it. I'm giving you the step-by-step process, and here it is. The first step is reviewing pictures from the last year. Over the last year, you have taken a bunch of pictures with your phone. Instead of just letting them sit there, we're gonna use them as data. We're gonna use them to inform us of what's important to us, what we want less of. So the way that you do this is you are gonna review your photos for 30 years. You're gonna skip all videos because videos just drain time, and you're gonna look for photos, not the perfect picturesque photos, but the photos that mean something to you. They trigger a certain emotion in you or certain thoughts that are reminders of good times and reminders of things that you didn't love so much. And we don't always take pictures of the shitty times in our life, but I'm gonna give you a few examples here of how you might notice a photo that guides you of what you want less of. I was working with a client yesterday on his year-end review, and after we were done reviewing the photos, he saw a few photos of work trips that he took. These work trips are trips where there's cocktail hours, where there's long dinner, and there's booze involved, and there's a bunch of different types of food where you kind of eat like shit. They are late nights, and as he was looking through these, he one was proud of himself. He doesn't go all out at these events like he used to back in his 20s. And he realized that they were drains. He got to connect with a few people, but those connections didn't outweigh how he was drained after these trips and what it took away from his daily work. So, no action to take with that right now. He doesn't have to cancel the trips for the next year or anything like that right now, but it's just information to have that these work trips weren't totally filling him up, might not be worth his time business-wise. Another thing he said, and this happened to me too, was that he saw a couple trips that he had forgotten about. And when I was going through my photos, I saw a picture of my daughter's talent show where she did a couple magic tricks, and that was back in April, and I had totally forgotten about that. So we take pictures of these memorable times. He forgot about this little trip he took. I forgot about this talent show that me and my daughter practiced for, and then she went and executed it. I had forgotten about that. And going back and looking at my pictures, it conjures up, it reminds me what's important. And the same thing with him. He had forgotten about this trip, and it was an awesome trip. I'll give you one more example of the photos. When I was going through mine, sometimes I'll take screenshots of things that are important to me, a quote that lands, or a post that I'm reading that lands. I got to review some of those, and one that really stuck out was a picture of a page of a book that I took that I read back in March, I think it was. And this picture of the book, I paused, I was like, why the hell did I take a picture of this page? And I read the page again. It brought me right back and reminded me why this impacted me. And bear with me for a moment. I'm gonna read the page, or it's only a paragraph. It's from a novel that I was reading. The narrator, she screwed up in her past. And she's an adult now, she has a kid, she has a husband, she's been married for a while, and this thing from way back in her past, her husband wasn't aware of, has resurfaced, and she's gonna address it. And this is what it says to keep life as it was, he would have to let me fuck things up a little bit more. But like this was marriage, right? This was love. I hoped it was. I didn't want to think about what came next, honestly. I had always depended on the fact that Aaron, that's her husband, thought I was good. I was a good mother, a good partner, a good person. And if he didn't think that, I wasn't sure what I'd do. And this is when it hit me. The rest of our lives, I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. Not just right now, but forever. Days would go by sometimes when he was the only adult I talked to in real life, and I realized that part of why I didn't care about the rest of the world was because he gave me what I needed. When I read that, it reminded me of my relationship with my wife. A few things. One, how important our relationship is, how much I do enjoy our one-on-one time. Days can get crazy sometimes with the logistics of life, but when we have one-on-one time and we get to drop our guard and relax, I like hanging out with her more than almost anyone else in the world. That landed with me. The other thing was that she fucked up and she had to communicate this to her husband, and she had these thoughts like he won't love me anymore. This is gonna ruin our relationship. I don't have anything huge in my past that I have to share with Brenda, but day to day, it was a reminder to share how I'm feeling, what's going on for me. We were just in Chicago a couple days after I did my year-end review, and we had a date day because my parents took the girls. When we got in the car, she said, Hey, can we check in? And because I just kind of done this year-end review, I was really open to it. This is what I coach guys on all the time being open, communicating, but I need these reminders too. She was like, Hey, can we check in? And I'm guessing she noticed I was a little off. I had overeaten the night before. I was feeling a little down lethargic. We drove to Chicago. It was go, go, go. And I think I was just a little drained, and I got to express that to her when we stopped, when we check in. We go through this three-step process that's a check-in. I've talked about it on the podcast. It's one of the really early podcasts, so you can go check it out. And afterwards, she said, Oh, so helpful. Thank you for letting me know where you're at. And going through my year-end review, reading this page, looking at the pictures was that reminder that I needed. All right. That's photos. I went on with photos for a while, but they are really impactful because they elicit emotion. And that's how we live life, right? We want to be logical in our brain, but our emotions are what drive us. So pictures can be very informative. Last thing about pictures is you do it for 30 minutes. What I like to do is set a timer for 15, go through my photos. When that 15 is up, I check out where I'm at. Maybe I'm only in May and I know I got to pick up the pace a little bit. Then you set a timer for another 50 minutes, finish the 30 minutes. After that, you move on to step two, reviewing your calendar. Kind of gonna do the same thing as you did with photos. What you're gonna do is have a piece of paper or typing. You're gonna go through your calendar, 30 minutes, and you're gonna note people that are memorable. You're gonna note events that were on your calendar that were memorable and meant something to you. And as I was doing this with my client, he said, I noticed my calendar was really messy at the beginning of the year, but things started to even out. I was a little more clean with my planning in the second half of the year. So that's kind of this macro thing that he learned about himself, that he was a little more organized in his life. When I was looking through my events, there were a few get-togethers with friends that I had forgotten about. I didn't take pictures of those. So going through my calendar reminded me. And one of the uh one of the get-togethers, I remembered that Brendan I were pretty stressed before it shopping, cooking, cleaning the house, getting ready for people to come over. And I also remember that afterwards we were both really happy that we had those people over. It was a really good time. What that informed me of is hey, next time we're getting ready for the party, maybe that stress leading up to it is necessary. So instead of resisting that stress and you know, getting into those little arguments with Brenda as we are getting ready, maybe just cruise through it, go with the flow a little bit more. So you go through your calendar, just like the photos, you're gonna go through for 15 minutes, see where you're at in the year, set a timer for another 15 minutes and try to get through the year. I find that for the photos for the calendar, the first part of the previous year is most important, and you usually go a little slower because that's the stuff that your brain forgets. As you get closer into November and December, those are fresh memories. You kind of remember those, but they're still impactful because a lot happens in our day-to-day, and we do forget because our brain can't remember everything. So, those are the first two steps: photos, calendar review. The next step in the year-end review process is answering some questions, and this is really where the wisdom is pulled. In the review that I give you, it's in the show notes. Just click on the link, you can get it. All the questions are lined up there. It's really easy to flow through. You're gonna give it another 30 minutes. One question when I was just working with my client is how would you contextualize the past year in a word or a phrase? And when I asked this to my client yesterday, he said, I look back at 2025 and it's probably the most stable, happy, productive year that I've had. I was like, dude, go write that down. If that's how you're gonna look at this past year, you're reviewing it right now, hell yeah, because there's gonna be a lot of things you want to keep doing. So you answer all these questions for 30 minutes. Once you're done with that, you know, you pause, you take a break, whatever, you've been working now for 90 minutes. That's your year-end review. There is in the guide one more step, and those are future forward questions. What do you want more of? What do you want less of? What are the goals? What are the habits you want to create? Who are the people you want in your life? Those kinds of questions will help you start setting goals, start creating new habits, making resolutions. So that is the last part of the year and review, and all of it takes two hours. Four steps, two hours. Review your pictures, review your events, answer some questions to gain some wisdom and knowledge with that data that you have, and then start planning for the year ahead. Start visualizing what you want in 2026. Get on your year-end review. At the end of it, you're feeling energized, you're feeling gratitude, appreciation. And when a man has that kind of energy in his life, he is happier around his family. He gets to tell his wife the vision that he has. And a man that has vision is sexy, it's strong, it's that masculine energy that's healthy and women are attracted to. If you've never done one before, here's your process. I just gave it to you. If you've done one in the past but haven't done it yet, go through this process again. You know how powerful it is. If you have any questions, you can set up a strategy session with me. I have some times later this month. We can do this step by step together. You can just put that strategy session on your calendar as when you're going to do your year and review. All right, that's how we're kicking off 2026. We're looking back at 2025. I hope you guys have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
