How to Unload Your Annoyance - Episode: 021
Think back to a moment when your frustration and anger threatened to bubble over, only to realize later that it was an overreaction. Sounds familiar, right? That's what we're unraveling in today's episode.
You'll learn how to recognize when your annoyance is hitting max capacity, and how to unload it in a healthy way – in a way that doesn't leave your kids thinking, "dad's just yelling again."
Speaker 1
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, episode number 21,. What is happening, everybody?
Speaker 1
I want to start with just something cool that happened the other day. I had noticed that I had been working a bunch, like kind of every extra minute I had I was back on my computer and thinking about work and it's awesome, like I'm digging growing this community and this business that we have, and I was distracted. I was not being very aware of when I was working. So I kind of noticed that and I wanted to make a shift. And usually one of the things that I'll notice that my meditation practice has become more sporadic, when I'm not managing my time the way that I really want to and that's aligned with my values, which is pretty much being present with my family, with my girls. I mean, it's a lot of what I talk about on this podcast and that's the first thing I kind of went to when I noticed that I was working too much get back into my meditation practice a routine daily 20 minutes. And I did it and it creates this space to be more discerning over the actions that I want to take. So, anyway, started meditating more and the cool thing that happened was the other day.
Speaker 1
Mornings have kind of been crazy this week because my older daughter's in camp and it was a short week because we're going out of town on Friday. So mornings were just busy waking everyone up, getting everybody dressed, packing lunches, packing food, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know the drill. Usually we're running out the door and hurrying everything along and our five year old most days wakes up and is like can we play, can we play? And she likes sleeping in. So no is usually the answer. We got to get going, we got to get going and we were ready ahead of time. The other day we had 10 minutes to spare and I noticed myself wanting to go into work and wanting to say goodbye to the family have an awesome day, my job's done here, go into my office and work. And I didn't. I paused and I thought, man, this is the 10 minutes and we can play. My daughter can get her play in, and so I just hey, you girls want to play keepy-uppy. Keepy-uppy is tapping a balloon, not letting it touch the ground. If you watch Bluey, they play keepy-uppy we used to call it. Don't let it touch the ground. When we were growing up and it was just this five minutes of getting to laugh with my family, my wife, my daughter. My four month old daughter was laying in the middle as we were sitting there and the balloon was. We'd let the balloon like fall and bounce off her belly and laugh and she was in the game too.
Speaker 1
So it's these moments that I've noticed make me feel full and proud and happy, and same with a lot of the dudes that I work with. They'll share these moments when they popped on some tunes and had a dance party with their family or just set aside 10 minutes to play cars and get on the ground with their kid and smile and be with them. Those are the small slices that I think we're looking for. So kind of wanted to share that with you because it hit home for me and it was a win, and sometimes I like to share wins. I think it's powerful to pause and celebrate the small things, because I'm back into work now and today what I want to talk about is an idea I'm playing with. I'm preparing to host this, stop losing your temper course and I'm getting the material ready and how the group is going to run.
Speaker 1
And this idea came to me that we have a limited capacity to hold our frustration and anger. We can only hold so much inside and then it comes out, and it can come out in a healthy way or can come out in an unhealthy way that damages relationships and makes us feel shitty about ourselves. So I have this picture in my head of one of those buckets that are at a splash pad or a kiddie pool where it's, like you know, six feet in the air and water's pouring into the bucket and as the bucket fills up, it just kind of stands there. But at a certain point, when the bucket's full, it tips over and the water comes splashing out and the bucket in my analogy here, if you want to visualize this the bucket is our capacity. It's our emotional capacity to feel frustrated, feel angry, annoyed and not react, just kind of hold it inside of us, and then the water that's filling it up are our thoughts, the thoughts that we have that are creating frustration and anger. And the discernment here is that it's not the outside world and the incidences that are happening around us that are filling up our bucket. It's our thoughts and that's where we can really find our power is identifying these thoughts.
Speaker 1
So let's say you're on vacation with your family and it's been a good vacation and it's been a lot. There's a lot of planning that goes into it, there's a lot of traveling and long lines and dinners out, and you're spending money and it's really fun. This is like what we do. We want to have a great vacation with our family and good family trips. And at the end of the trip it just comes to a head where your kids are asking for more. They want to go on one more ride, they want to go out to dinner one more time or do this one more activity. And you get into an argument with them and that argument, that reaction, is because your bucket's full, because afterwards, after you argue with your kids, you're not. That's not how you wanted to show up on vacation. It's an overreaction. Your wife kind of points it out to you. You know it already and it feels you know just a bummer.
Speaker 1
So what happened here? If we look at this, how did the bucket get filled up? It wasn't just in that moment when your kids were asking for more, more, more. The bucket started to get filled at the beginning of the trip, maybe even before the trip at work. It started getting filled when you couldn't find the right shirt as you were packing, or when you were rushing out the door and someone forgot to go pee and they had to run back in and go pee. You were having thoughts in those moments like come on, can't we get going, let's go, we gotta move. How could you forget to go pee? I told you to go pee 10 minutes ago and it feels like it's the incident right, that the kid is making you late, but it's our thoughts. We're interpreting that situation as wrong and it shouldn't be happening and it makes us feel frustrated and we can take it. We're not gonna flip out in that moment. We're still excited about the trip. Maybe we even like laugh at it.
Speaker 1
But then there's traffic on the way to the airport or you're standing in long security lines and all these things that are happening throughout the trip. Our bucket starts to fill up and we're navigating it. We're still having fun in moments. But the small incidences where the kids are acting up at dinner and the plans aren't going the way you want, we start to have thoughts, our brain starts interpreting them that this shouldn't be going that way, your buckets getting pretty full with water with these thoughts that you've been having throughout the trip. And this isn't to say like we're not blaming ourselves here. I don't want to blame us for filling up our own bucket. Like these things that happen in life, life's tough, but when we fight against what's happening with thoughts that we are thinking it should be different, or people should be acting different, or kids should be acting different, or something gets delayed and it shouldn't have gotten delayed, we allow our bucket to get filled up and your brain, in that moment when your kids are asking for more, is going to start feeding you thoughts like they're being ungrateful, they don't appreciate all the effort their mom and I put into this trip. And your bucket tips, the water gets dumped out and you're bummed. Right, it's not the biggest deal in the world. Right, you'll recover. The trip was still fun. But you know, if we take a look in the mirror, this is something that we could get better at. And how do we get ahead of it? We don't let our bucket fill up. We stop our bucket from filling up with these thoughts. These thoughts are going to come. There's going to be some water in the bucket, but we can dump the bucket away from our family, and the way that we do this are thought dumps.
Speaker 1
Talked about thought dumps before. It's putting your thoughts on paper. It's putting your thoughts on a computer screen and type them up, or putting your thoughts into the ether by saying them out loud. When, on vacation, this could look like early in the morning, you take a walk or you go grab a coffee and write it on a scratch piece of paper. Like we start doing these thought dumps and start getting the thoughts of what's frustrating us out of our head, we'll start emptying that bucket. A few podcasts ago I talked about some Stoic philosophy and Stoic practices, and this is a Stoic practice that Marcus Aurelius talks about.
Speaker 1
Before his day started, he would think about the things that were going to be frustrating him that day. He was the emperor of Rome. There are going to be people that come and ask him for things. There are going to be people that make mistakes, and he understood that if he got ahead of that, he wouldn't react so quickly in the moment. So if we're getting ready to travel for the day, we can go and thought dump. There's probably going to be long lines at the airport. There's probably going to be traffic, though rental car might not go very smoothly. That's going to suck, it's going to be a bummer. Those are thoughts in our head. I'm going to get frustrated Getting those out.
Speaker 1
It's crazy, but it works. It really works. And when you start doing this, your actions are going to change and you can look ahead. You can write what might come up and frustrate you and you can write about yesterday the way that the kids were acting at dinner was a pain in the ass. They weren't listening on the hike that we took and it freaked me out those kinds of things that have happened in the past. We can write them down, empty out the bucket and when you start doing this work, your actions are gonna change. This is what I'm gonna get into.
Managing Emotional Capacity
Speaker 1
You can choose how to respond instead of just letting your bucket dump all over the place. If your bucket's not full, you can choose how to respond, like maybe you wanna call in a sub, maybe you notice the bucket filling up and you're like my kids are asking for more, more, more. I notice that my thoughts are thinking that they're ungrateful. They don't appreciate all the effort I'm checking out. Call mom in, can you take over this conversation? Or you can choose to call a time out and take a breather. Just step away, take three breaths, see if you can get back in the game and handle it without reacting from the anger and losing your temper.
Speaker 1
The real I think the real powerful one is being able to connect and empathize with how the other person might be feeling. Our kid in that moment could be like yeah, you could just say like, yeah, I get it. I wish the trip didn't have to end either. I wish we could do more, more, more. I totally get it and we've done a lot and the answer's no here, like we've had a really, really good time and we're not gonna do anymore right now. Who knows how they'll respond, but you give them at least that opportunity to be seen. You get why they want to do more and then you tell them how it is and then you can put your foot down or whatever needs to happen.
Speaker 1
So notice, when your bucket is starting to get filled up, when you start to feel tight or frustrated or gritted teeth and you're trying to hold it all together and, instead of letting your bucket tip over. Empty it out in a responsible way. Doing a thought dump, typing it out on a computer, getting your thoughts out by taking a walk and speaking them out loud. It's really going to impact your emotional capacity. It's gonna feel better. You're gonna unload some of that stuff without damaging the relationships. So try it out. Let me know what you think. Hope you guys have an awesome week. Go to thedurabledad.com. If you wanna learn more about this work, take it to the next level and I will catch you later.
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