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
113: Building Steady Confidence With Stoic Integrity
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What does it actually mean to live a virtuous life?
Not theory or philosophy quotes on Instagram, but in real life.
In this episode, we break down the Stoic principle of virtue and how it applies to your training, your leadership, your marriage, and your fatherhood. Stoic philosophy isn’t abstract—it’s practical. It’s about building self-discipline, emotional control, courage, and patience in normal, everyday moments.
Most high-achieving men have the ambition, but struggle with consistency. Dialed in for a week. Then off track. Calm at work. Reactive at home. Focused in the gym. Scrolling at night.
That swing kills confidence.
Stoic integrity is different. It’s steady. It’s proving who you are through daily behavior.
Highlights:
- Why men live on emotional highs and lows—and how that erodes self-trust
- The difference between short bursts of intensity and long-term integrity
- How consistency (like quitting alcohol for 18 months) builds real confidence
- The four Stoic virtues—courage, discipline, justice, patience—and how they show up in modern life
- Why missing once is normal, but repeating the miss creates drift
- How quick recovery strengthens character
Practical Takeaways:
- Choose one area where your behavior doesn’t match the man you want to be—fitness, leadership, marriage, fatherhood.
- Identify the virtue required (courage, discipline, patience, self-awareness). Practice that trait deliberately.
- When you slip, recover fast. Don’t spiral. Prove it again the next day.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Stoic integrity isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being consistent. When your actions match your standards, you build a steady confidence your family can feel.
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 113. Today, what we're gonna talk about is living a virtuous life. This is a stoic principle. I think of it as living a life of integrity. Last week I was talking to a client who's been getting back on the workout train, getting back into the gym. He's overall a healthy guy, super active, but he wants to be in the gym more to kind of balance out the outdoor activity that he does, more mobility, more strength. And this happens for a lot of us when we get into our mid-40s. So he's working on that and he's been sporadic with his progress. He's in the gym two times a week, he's in the gym three times a week, but his goal has been four times a week, and he hasn't been hitting that goal. And when we started talking about it, he says he feels like he's been on a little bit of a roller coaster. And it's those evenings. Usually he gets off of work and gets a workout in before he goes home. It's those evenings where he gets off work and he wants the simple pleasure. He wants to do the easy thing. And instead of going to the gym, he orders food out and he gets caught up in Netflix or on his phone. And when we were talking about this, he was reminded of about a year and a half ago when he stopped drinking for 18 months and compared how he's feeling about going to the gym to when he stopped drinking. And when he stopped drinking, he felt a steady confidence because he was staying consistent. And I would say he was living in integrity. It's important to him to not drink, and his actions were in alignment with what's important to him. That's a virtuous life. So let me backtrack a little bit here. I said the virtuous life is a principle from stoic philosophy. I've talked about stoic philosophy on the podcast before. You can go back and listen to episode 17, gain more control using Stoicism. That's an awesome kind of intro. This this podcast is going to dive into it a little bit. And Stoicism, it's an old philosophy, and it's not so much a philosophy as it is a way of life. It started about 300 BCE. Most of the texts that we read and learn from today are from around the first century. And Ryan Holliday, he's an author, he's a speaker, he's made this resurgence of implementing the stoic lifestyle into the day-to-day life today. And the virtuous life. So let's break down what a virtuous life means. The word virtuous means having or exhibiting virtue. Great. Love when Webster's dictionary defines a word with one of the root words. So what is a virtue? Virtue is morally good behavior or character. I want to break that down a little bit today because when you read about Stoic philosophy, they talk a lot about the virtuous characteristics you want. Courage, justice, self-discipline, those characteristics. But how do they actually turn into morally good behaviors? A lot of the guys that I work with, a lot of men, dads, we're we go on this roller coaster through life of high emotions, low emotions, high emotions, low emotions. And maybe you feel like you don't have any emotions. There's that numbing out sensation. And for this guy, it's that ordering dinner, watching some screen, and your dopamine spikes. A lot of guys will just scroll on their phone or they'll be checking emails really late because we get those high dopamine hits. And then we're telling ourselves that we shouldn't be doing it, and there's some guilt and there's some shame, but we don't peel our eyes off the screen, and we still watch the screen, and it turns into this high-low cycle, or it's an anger cycle where you are yelling at your kids or you're arguing with your wife, and as you're doing it, you're telling yourself you shouldn't be doing it, but you don't stop doing it, and it becomes another cycle. Those types of cycles aren't in integrity with the man you want to be. And on the flip side, living a virtuous life means knowing the good moral behaviors you want to execute on, and then having the morally good characteristics to execute on them. And when you do, what my client said when he had quit drinking alcohol and was staying with it, you start to create this steady confidence. When you live in integrity with yourself, you build a steady confidence that helps you take more risks in your career or willing to switch up your daily routine and try something new and be a little bit messy. You don't need to prove things to the outside world as much because you're proving to yourself that you're good, that you're doing a good job. So that's why we want to live a virtuous life. And the Stoics would say once you start living a virtuous life, you start affecting the people in your world in a positive way. Most of the Stoics, the texts that we have from the past, these men, mostly men, because that's just the times that they were back then, were in regular day-to-day life. They were dealing with problems in government, in their community. They had families and they talk about it in their journals, in their texts, how to navigate these parts of life. So what I want to do today is just give you a little framework of how to start living a virtuous life. And with a lot of my coaching, how I work with men is that we start small. And we start small because we already have a lot going on. And when we want to make a change and start living more of the man that we want to be, we start small so we don't overwhelm ourselves with more responsibility. Small changes, one step at a time over the course of a year, over the course of the next 10 years makes a huge difference. So that's the approach that I take. And when we think about living in integrity, that's how I want you guys to think of it. So the first thing you're gonna do is identify one behavior and the characteristics that are required to live that behavior. Most of the guys that I work with know the behaviors that they want to start living in more often. And those could either be healthy lifestyles and eating and activity. It could be managing their reactions around their kids or how they engage in conversation with their wife when there's difficult conversations to be had. At work, the guys that I am coaching right now, I feel like the main focus has been thinking more strategically and learning how to delegate and take it to the next level in business. So those are a bunch of examples of behaviors, characteristics that you're gonna want to start thinking about are discipline, patience, courage. I'll give you an example back to this guy that is going to the gym more often and also had a lot of success with not drinking. When he wasn't drinking, he had some conversations with buddies when he went out and had to tell people that he wasn't drinking. That takes some courage. You go into those conversations and you feel kind of embarrassed because you are not doing what everyone else is doing, and you have to have the courage to say that you're not drinking. Or with the working out, one of the characteristics that he's bringing in is discipline to get off of work, have his bag packed, ready to go, and go to the gym. But he also needs to conjure up some courage because one of the things that we do a lot when we are trying something new is we want to get it right the first time. We don't want to look like we don't know what we're doing or that we're a beginner. I see this a lot with guys that are changing their careers or looking to do something different, start their own business. They don't want to be a beginner again. And this is something that we have to have some courage to mess up, to look messy. So that's that's one of the characteristics he's pulling on. So the first step to live a virtuous life is to choose a behavior where you're tending not to be living in integrity. Choose that behavior, decide that you want to start living in that behavior, identify the characteristics, and then the next thing to remember is that it doesn't have to be perfect. We're gonna slip, that's okay. Last week, our family was on our Texas trip. It's an annual trip that we take down to Texas and we drive to Oklahoma City, we go visit our daughter's birth families, and it's a family trip. I've talked about the difference between a family trip and a vacation before. The first part of this trip is a family trip. A lot of logistics, a lot of planning to execute. And on those kinds of family trips, Brenda and I really focus on taking care of ourselves leading up to the trip and on the trip. That just means getting our meditation and making sure we're eating healthy, making sure we're working out and moving our bodies, because then we'll be able to roll with any of the variables that might happen on family trips. So living a virtuous life for me would mean living those behaviors during this family trip. And I did it before, did it the first two mornings, woke up early, got a workout in, didn't overeat at the hotel buffet. Third morning, wheels fell off, didn't wake up early, had a McDonald's milkshake and a bag of peanut MMs and way too many tortilla chips at the happy hour. Ending that third day, I told myself, all right, gotta get back on track for the next day. It was travel day, back home, and I I shifted. I shifted back into those behaviors the next day. And I'm telling you this because a virtuous life doesn't mean that you're a perfect man. You're a man that makes mistakes, that falters. However, then when you screw up or take a step back, if you stay in integrity and live that virtuous life, you rebound quickly. James Clear talks about building habits and atomic habits, and you're supposed to miss a day here and there. The most important part is that following day, getting that habit back on track. Don't spin into the shame cycles of I messed up, I screwed up. I think this is where a lot of people get discipline wrong. They use discipline against themselves because they think discipline has to be the same thing every day. That is not what a virtuous life means. It doesn't mean getting it perfect, but a virtuous life does mean not repeating those same mistakes, getting back into integrity as quick as possible. So a virtuous life means identifying the behaviors and characteristics that you want to exude, and then using those characteristics to create those behaviors in your life. And when you can do that, you create this steady confidence. You become a durable dad, one that can take on external variables and stay steady because you know that you're getting done what you need to get done, that you are a man of integrity. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, one of the Stoics that we learn a lot from, says, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. So you listen to this podcast, and maybe you're already living in integrity in a lot of areas, and recognize that, celebrate that because that'll create that steady confidence. And if there's an area that you're not living in integrity with yourself, revisit it, reflect on it, understand how you want to start shifting, what characteristics is it courage, is it discipline, is it patience, is it self-awareness that you need to cultivate to get back into integrity, create that steady confidence that is going to uh let you lead a virtuous life, a life where you are exemplifying good values, good moral behaviors, good characteristics. All right. That's what I got for you guys today. You start living a virtuous life, and all the people in your life will benefit from it. Hope you have an awesome day, and I'll catch you next time.
