051: Emotional Agility – A Dad's Edge

Besides , not much same old , same old . So if I ran into you today and you were like , hey , tommy , what's new ? I would tell you that we no longer have furniture in our living room , and this is something that Brenda's been talking about for five years or so , and she's reading Peter Atia's new book Outlive .

So her inspiration to move all the furniture out of our living room has been reignited , with the goal to inspire more movement , get away from the sedentary living room .

And the long term play here is that our hip mobility , our ability to stand and lay down on the ground , really declines as we get older , and this is inspiring us to stay more mobile , more agile . Which is interesting that I just use the word agile , because agile is part of the topic for today's podcast . So I won't talk about the living room anymore .

I will talk about becoming emotionally agile . So not physically agile , but emotionally agile , and I just taught this to a group of entrepreneurs mastermind that I'm in . I taught this concept and I think it's something that applies to dads .

So today we're going to talk about emotional agility , we're going to define what it is and I'm going to give you three tactics to help you become more emotionally agile .

So when I think of agile , I kind of picture myself on one side of a river and there's a bunch of river stones , without stopping but not going too fast , and fluidly moving over the stones to the other side of the river . Or football practice and there are the big tires out there and you have to go high knees through the tires .

You want to be soft on your toes and you want to move fluidly throughout that drill . That's what I think of when I think of agile . So emotional agility is being able to flow through different emotions . Emotions are energy in motion . E motion , energy in motion . So we want to keep that energy flowing and moving . That's what emotional agility is .

And the opposite of emotional agility is emotional rigidity . I heard Susan David frame it up this way . She's a psychologist and writes about emotional agility . So emotional rigidity is when we experience an emotion , something happens in the world and we experience an emotion and we stiffen up against it .

We think we shouldn't be feeling that way and the emotion , the energy of that emotion , gets stuck and this has an effect . It has an effect on our productivity , on our stress , on the success or the failures that we have in life . So we want to keep the emotions flowing when we're rigid to them .

Dr Joe Dispenza talks about how stuck emotions can over time become our moods and if we stay in those moods after a few days or weeks it becomes our temperament . And if we stay in that temperament for a couple months it becomes our personality and we can change that .

We can change our temperament , our moods , our personality and it starts by getting those stuck emotions unstuck . And I like how Dr Joe Dispenza talks about it .

I think of an example , as something triggers us at work and it's something that we're pissed off about , or maybe it's a disappointment that happens at work and then our mood Later that day is irritated and maybe we hold on to that irritation for a couple days , and then our temperament becomes grumbling around the house and we're short-tempered or we're not present ,

and that temperament sticks around for a couple weeks , a couple months and the personality starts to take shape and we become a grouch . We become that grumpy dad that isn't fun , that isn't having excitement in his life anymore . And this happens because we stay rigid to our emotions . We fight them instead of allowing them and being agile with them .

So shit's gonna happen in life . We're gonna have something at work that triggers us or something at home that triggers us . We might slip into a rut , but if we're emotionally agile , we can get out of those ruts quickly . We're gonna feel frustrated , disappointed , guilty .

We can feel those uncomfortable emotions and be agile enough to stay present and not react quickly and move back into more of a flow and more of a upbeat emotion . So emotional agility isn't about not feeling negative emotions . It's about becoming aware of all of your emotions and opening up to them .

To become more emotionally agile , you need to get really good at feeling and we'll hear this message a lot that you have to feel your feelings .

I didn't know what that meant for most of my life . What does it mean to feel ? The first time I really started to understand this was at a meditation retreat that I went to , and it was seven years ago it was in Colorado , kind of in the middle of nowhere , and Brent and I arrived , we got into the room and this teacher was there .

He was kind of a no BS meditation teacher . We sat down , he introduced himself for a couple minutes and then he said , okay , let's meditate . And we sat there and he guided us . He turned our awareness away from our brain and into our body and I remember slowly my mind quieting down and feeling something .

There was a stretching across my chest and I had never felt that before . I was sitting there .

I wasn't moving in my chair , I was physically still , but something had moved and the longer I sat there and the longer he pointed our attention to our body , other movement started showing up , other energy , other sensations and it was a whole bunch of stuff and I was sitting there thinking like is this real or am I just making it up ?

It is real , it's not made up . We have energy moving through our body and we're not aware of it and it's happening all the time , every day , and I hadn't noticed it until then . And we weren't talking about emotions that weekend . We weren't naming things like happy , sad , angry , disappointed , scared .

We weren't naming emotions , we were just experiencing the energetic sensations that were present in the body and it's those sensations that can keep us stuck , that we can get rigid to , and they make us procrastinate and they make us angry really quickly and it keeps us spinning out .

So tuning in to those emotions is going to allow us to become more emotionally agile and you don't have to go to a meditation retreat to notice this , to pick up this skill of feeling . The guys that I work with will be in one of our first sessions and let's say we're talking about making a career change and the guy says I don't know what to do next .

And I'll say , okay , when you think I don't know what to do next , how do you feel ? And he'll say something like I feel like there are so many options and I can't choose . He'll give me another thought . He won't tell me how he's feeling and by the fourth session , let's just say it's the same thought I don't know what to do next .

And we pause and I ask him how does it make you feel when you think I don't know what to do next ? And he'll feel a pit in his stomach or he'll feel restless or tension in his shoulders or in his limbs . It doesn't take much work to start to learn how to feel , how to start to build this skill , and the most successful leaders are emotionally agile .

Something crappy happens and two minutes later they're back and they're in a productive state . The dads that are emotionally agile they can be there for their kids .

When their kids aren't able to handle their emotions and , let's say , they're having a tantrum or they're having a really hard time in high school with some social stuff going on An emotionally agile dad is able to be there for them . So the secret to becoming emotionally agile is to become aware of what the heck we're feeling and three ways to do that .

I'm going to give you three tactics to try out to start to feel , because feeling is a skill and , just like any other skill , you want to learn . You start small and you keep getting reps . You keep getting reps . The first time you try to feel , you might not feel anything . That's fine . That's where most guys start .

So to start getting your reps , you can go on to Google and search two minute body scan and whatever video pops up , try it . If you're already meditating and you're familiar with a somatic body scan type in 10 minute body scan and try it . Get some more reps in .

There's also this app called how we Feel and it's a really good tool to build your emotional agility . If you look it up in the app store , it's a heart with different colors . And do it for a few days . Don't go all out . Don't tell yourself that I'm going to check in with this app for the next month . Just try it for a few days . Click through it .

They have some really cool short videos that explain the science behind this stuff , behind emotional agility and our emotions and this energy inside of us . And the third option is to set up a strategy call Like go to thedurabledadcom , set up a call with me .

You answer a couple of questions and in one of the questions , just write her podcast episode number 51 , and want to understand what the heck feeling is , want to get some reps in and understand . That's what those strategy calls are there for .

They're to take whatever you're hearing , learning on this podcast , and taking it to the next level , taking it to the next step . So we want to become more emotionally agile . We don't want to get stuck and rigid in our emotions and we want to flow through them better .

And three things to try out are body scan , meditations , the how we feel app or setting up a strategy call . That's what I got for you guys today . Thank you for listening . I love recording these podcasts and I know you're out there listening , so thank you , appreciate that . Hope you have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time .