Catch Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself - Episode: 122
Most blow-ups do not come out of nowhere. Your body usually gives you a warning first.
In this episode, Tommy breaks down how to notice the physical signs of emotion, name what is happening, and respond before the fire takes over. The goal is not to suppress what you feel. It is to take responsibility for how you carry it into your marriage, parenting, work, and decisions.
Highlights:
- Why raised voices, defensiveness, and shutdown are often late-stage signals
- How to build emotional intelligence.
- Why naming the emotion helps you respond with more control
- What to do when your internal fire is running hot
- How to rebuild momentum when the fire has gone dim
- Why small next steps work better than trying to fix everything at once
- How emotional awareness changes difficult conversations at home
Practical takeaways:
- Revisit one recent moment when you snapped, shut down, or numbed out.
- Identify where you felt the emotion in your body and put a clear name to it.
- Decide what the moment needed: a pause and long exhale, or one small action to rebuild momentum.
Think about the last conversation you wish you had handled differently. Before you judge the reaction, go back and find the first signal your body gave you.
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Alright, what's up? Episode 122. I remember this conversation that Brenda, my wife, and I had. It was early in our marriage, and we were still living in Colorado. We were in our living room at this one-bedroom apartment that we lived in. Brenda and I were discussing something, and I was saying something, then Brenda was saying something, and she said, Stop yelling. Why are you yelling? I said, I'm not yelling, in a voice that was louder than just my talking voice. And this wasn't the first time we had this back and forth where she said that I was yelling, and I said I wasn't yelling. But for whatever reason, this time I was like, okay, I caught myself. Why am I raising my voice? Maybe this is something I want to work on. And what was going on was that there was an emotion inside that I was reacting to, that I wasn't managing.
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Last week on a Brotherhood call, the Brotherhood is a group that's made up of men that come with us on our hiking trips. And the whole purpose of this group and these calls that we do every week is to hold each other accountable and continue our personal growth, whatever that looks like. And on last week's call, we were talking about emotional awareness and self-motivation. And we likened our emotions to a fire, a fire that's burning inside of us. And when we're not aware of the fire, it can get out of hand. And it usually gets out of hand in one of two ways. One, it rages with a lot of heat, and that heat in the real world looks like raising our voices, like I was doing. It looks like snapping back really quickly in a conversation or getting defensive and wanting to back off. The fire can also die down. It can get dim, it can get cold, and that looks like a loss of motivation and feeling like you're in a rut and probably procrastinating, not getting started on what you want to do, just that feeling of being stuck when your fire is dim. We usually become aware of our fires when it's too late, when we've messed up a conversation, or we've yelled at our kids, or we start numbing out by boozing, by porn, by overeating. Either way, there's always this fire inside of us. And the first thing that we talked about on this call was that you are not the fire. The fire is emotions and it burns, but the man is separate from the fire. And the goal is to become the fire tender, to assess the fire, to either stoke it or dampen it. And that's what we're gonna dive into today: how to tend your fire. When you do, you have more control over yourself. You slow down your reactions in
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the actual moment. Your teenager talks back to you in a snarky little voice, and you respond with a level head. You notice that you're flying around in the middle of the day, task to task, but really not being productive. The fire tender can taper the fire down a little bit, can refocus and hit the most important task. So the first step of becoming the tender of your fire, being able to be more aware of your emotions, is assessing it. Assessing the fire by locating it and naming it. And to locate it, we start observing the body. There was this research project done in Finland where researchers analyzed the way 700 different volunteers from different countries described emotions in their body. And they created this heat map of the body for a bunch of different emotions. And you can go check this out. We discussed it in the Brotherhood call. We looked at it together. Fear lit up in the chest and in the brain. And anger was in the chest and the face also, but also the arms and the fists. And happiness was warm. It wasn't as hot as fear and anger, but it was in the whole body. After we looked at this map on the group call, we actually practiced locating it. And we did this exercise where we prompted different emotions and we started asking questions like what do you notice in your body right now? Is it hot? Is it cold? Where do you feel tight? Where do you feel relaxed? The heat map's awesome because it shows kind of heat and cold and where energy goes, but there's also that sensation part of it. Fear doesn't just light up your chest and brain, it also feels tense and tight. Happiness is warm in the whole body, but it's also light and it's also expansive and feels open. Once
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you locate the fire, then you name it frustrated or fear or happiness. You start building your vocabulary, your emotional vocabulary. And on the call, we looked at a feelings wheel. And if you've never looked at a feelings wheel before, it's color-coded feelings and there's like main feelings in the middle. And as you move out, there's a bunch of different ways to describe similar feelings, and you get really nuanced when you're looking at this feeling wheel, and you get nuanced because we are nuanced. As much as we want life to be black and white, right and wrong, it's not. And being able to lean in and describe nuance in your body helps you become a better tender of your
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fire. In most of the one-on-one coaching sessions that I have with my guys, we do some type of tending of the fire. Last week I was coaching a guy who's an athlete, he's a marathon runner, he's a business owner, and the last few months, the business owning side and his dad husband responsibilities have been taking a lot of time. And he hasn't been working out. He hasn't been getting his runs in. And he came to the call wanting to talk about getting back into his training routine. As he was talking, he was using words like, I should be able to get back into the rhythm, I'm setting myself back. And I started to notice that this is a line of negative thinking. So we paused and I asked him to check in on his fire. And when we settled down and he looked to locate it, map it out, he noticed that his chest was feeling tight, kind of all over, and his throat was feeling tight, and he noticed that his heart was beating pretty fast. Perfect. We're locating it. I asked him to name it, and he called it anxious, and he called it overwhelmed. So I asked him to take a couple slow breaths with long exhales, and that's one way we can tend a hot fire. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But when we did that, he checked on his fire again, and this time he felt exhausted. Tightness was gone, but there was an empty feeling in there, and then when we named it, he named it defeated. So I'm gonna tell you what to do to tend the fire, but first I want to point out this nuance. I want to point out how the fire changes. When we're not tending our fire, it can rage, it can dim, and his was doing both. That really fast-moving anxiousness when we started looking at it, and then it was also really dim. This is the nuanced part of tending our fire, and humans want absolute, but that's not how our emotions work. If he had only looked at the anxious part of the fire, he would have misassessed it. So in this session, he assessed the fire. Now, what do you do to tend it? That second part of being the fire
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tender. And if it's a hot fire, if it's anger, if it's anxiousness, if it's overwhelmed, moving really quickly, what we want to do is stop. We don't want to add more things to our plate. We don't want to engage in a conversation. We want to stop, pause. I love the long exhales as a practical skill because you think about exhausting the fire inside. You breathe out a lot of air, and the fire doesn't have as much air to work with. This move actually activates your parasympathetic nervous system and you start to settle down. That's what you do with a raging fire. And then what do we do with a dim fire? We wanna fan it. We wanna give it a little kindling without overwhelming it. And what does that look like in real life? Well, we took a step back, and the first thing we did with this guy in the coaching session was we looked at the last two years and the progress he had made. He had ran three marathons after not running marathons for a few years, and he had been training and he had been working out. That negative self-talk wasn't helping his fire. A little bit of positive reinforcement, okay. That defeated feeling, it's not super pumped, confident momentum, but he's feeling a little bit warmer of a fire. And then what happened, and this is happens a
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lot with our brain. Oh, we're feeling a little better. Let's go all in again. Now I want to get back into prime training shape. I want to get this perfect, I want to crush it now. That's not what a dim fire needs. What a dim fire needs is kindling, small next steps, not a huge pile of wood. So that's what we dialed in. I asked him when we meet next week, what would a few small steps be between now and then that would look like a win? And he said, if I got three 20-minute workouts in, they could be runs, they could be stretches, they could be lifting. If I got three 20-minute sessions in, that would be a win. We met the next week. He executed those three sessions, we checked in on the fire, and it was warmer. It wasn't overwhelming, it wasn't dim. And his self-talk was more level-headed. He was telling himself, I'm making progress, I'm getting back into the groove. That's how you tend your fire. If you're listening to this and you're like, oh, this is all making perfect sense, but how the hell do I actually practice this? There are ways to practice this. And for me, the way that I learned to tend my fire really started with a meditation retreat that Brendan and I went to. And in this meditation retreat, they weren't talking about emotions. It was a vipassana practice that our teacher was guiding us through. And vipassana translates to insight or clear thinking. And basically, what we did was sit still and observe what was moving. And what I noticed after sitting still there for a while was I noticed movement. I noticed waves in my chest, and they were going up and down, and they were kind of going in a circular motion, and I kept sitting and staying still and observing, and they started moving up through my throat and my face. And I didn't realize it at the
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time, but that was tending my fire. That was my fire. These were my emotions. And that was probably over a decade ago now that we went to that meditation retreat. And it's still a practice for me to notice how I'm feeling. And just the other day, Brendan and I were on the back patio of this coffee shop, and we were talking about plans for the summer, discussing child stuff, logistics, and started to get into something else that we weren't seeing eye to eye on. And she was like, I don't want to talk about this anymore. You're moving your arms a lot, you're starting to get worked up. And 10 years ago, I would have probably leaned in, kept going, explained why we need to get this figured out now. But last week, when she said that, I sat back in my chair, relaxed my hands, relaxed my shoulders, took a few slow breaths, all really quickly. This happens really quickly, and we didn't carry on the conversation. And I wasn't really ready to admit that my reaction was wrong or that my perspective was wrong. But what I understood was that she was feeling uncomfortable, and it's my job to manage my fire so it doesn't trigger her as much. This is how we have difficult conversations. This is how we handle conflict, tending our fire. All right. So we all have emotions. We have a fire burning inside of us. It's always there, and it's our responsibility not to let that fire get out of hand, not to let it burn out, and not to blame our fire on other people. Our fire, our responsibility. And the way to become the tender of our fire is to assess it, to name it, to locate it, and then figure out exactly what it needs. And I gave you some tools of what it needs to either cool off or how you can kindle it and how you can heat it up. To practice this on your own, the first thing you can do is pick a time in the last week where you messed up a conversation that you were having, or pick a time where you went for an IPA to chill out a little bit. Go back to that moment. Ask, what was the thing happening?
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What was the thing that was said? What was the scenario? Where did you feel in your body? Locate the fire, describe it, name how you were feeling before you got frustrated, before you numbed out and drank that IPA. And then if you were back in that moment right now, what would the tender of the fire have done differently? And that's the whole rep. That's how you start building the skill, building that awareness of your emotions. The other thing you can do, if you want some help building these skills, is hire a coach, grab a time on my calendar. This is what I do in most of my coaching sessions. I help a man learn about his inner world, how to tend his fire so he can create a warm fire that's motivation and starts moving us forward one small step at a time. You can build these skills. The way that I handled my fire on the patio last week is different than how I used to manage my fire, tend my fire. So that's what I got for you guys this week. You are not your fire. Take responsibility for your fire, be the tender, and have an awesome week.
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