Ep #212: The Relationship Triad

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Hey there, and welcome back. Listen, we are going to talk about tough stuff today. Are you ready? Say yes. This is something that I see all the time with my coaches, relationship, people, my loved ones. As humans in general, we all struggle with this. Are you ready for it? Okay. When we begin to change, improve, master personal responsibility, when we no longer need validation and approval, when we’re no longer over-giving, under-getting whatever the thing is, the old habits and behaviors, the old cycles, no matter where they came from, when we stop doing the habitual things that are halting our growth, causing a struggle, stopping our satisfaction, a few things begin to happen, which causes a whole another bucket of problems to be solved.

So we’re going to talk about relationships and what happens in those relationships and what you can do to improve them.

Got it? Get your paper and your pen. I’m going to talk about the relationship triad. Three major points or things to pay attention to that you’ll come back to time and time again. I want you to create a chart, put it in front of you, talk to your loved one about it. And I am talking about any relationship. I see this with entrepreneurs in general.

They’re so in love with what they do. They’re so focused on serving. They’re so focused on succeeding, or rather saying not failing, that we often lose sight of what’s important in our relationships. Not that we mean to. It’s just because we’re geared a little different, right? And our loved ones don’t always approve or agree or understand why our work is so important to us.

So, this is what it’s been for me. Some of you’ll be a little different, so you use it the way that you want to. So, a couple of examples. You can use this with your children, with your loved one partner, whatever. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Clients even. I’m going to give you three questions to ask. One is for you, one is for them, and the other is for both of you.

So you’re going to draw two lines on a paper so that you have three columns. At the top of column one: What do I want? Column two: what do they want? And you’re going to put the other person in. You can do this with multiple people. You can do it with your best friend, with your relative, with your partner, your husband, your wife, your kid. What do they want?

And you determine who they is. And the third one: what do we want together? So I want independence. I want support. I know I can’t control everything, but this is your wish list, so you get to put anything you want. I want love. Hugs, hugs, hugs. Snuggles. I want my feet rubbed. I want to know that I’m important.

I want to be prioritized. I want you to just make your whole list of everything you want, anything you can think of. What do you truly desire? I want coffee served in bed right in the morning. I want to be woken up with love. I want to be appreciated. I want to know that I matter. I want quality time. No tv, no electrical devices.

I want date night. Once a week or once a month. What else do you want? Just think about it. Make a list, keep writing. If you’re listening to this in your car, you can come back to it. But for those who have a paper and pen, just keep writing. What else? I’m just giving you ideas because sometimes we kind of can’t even imagine what else, because we haven’t experienced it yet, so we forget to put it on our list.

Right. What else do you want from your relationship with that person? For me, you, I, I said freedom, very top thing. I have to have the freedom to be myself, to go where I want to go, to do what I want to do, and I want to be loved and accepted for who I am, not for what I can be for you, not for what you need me to do, but for who I am as an individual, as a soul aligned being, this is me.

I want to be accepted as me. So if I were doing this with you, that would be my expectation. To be accepted in my highs, in my lows, and my being dynamic. In all of it. I want to be loved and accepted. I don’t want you to try to change me. I don’t want you to try to control me or to emotionally manipulate me.

I want to be myself. I want to be free. I want to come and go as I please, and I don’t want to have to bend and break the who I am as a person. Bend over my myself, bend over backward in order to keep you around. That’s my wishlist. What’s yours? The middle. They, so first bring to mind, who is they? Is it one of your children?

Is it your husband or wife? Maybe. Maybe it’s a, an old-time friend. Maybe it’s a new friend. Maybe it’s a peer. So, I’m just going to bring one person to mine and then I would ask them to fill that out because I’m going to be in a conversation with this person. I probably should have started with that. Hey, can we have a talk? Like, I’d like to have some quality time with you so we can do this exercise.

I can get to that at the end. So you’re going to let this person just lay out their desire list. I really should have done this one for Valentine’s Week. What do they want? Don’t try to correct them. Don’t make them wrong. Don’t tell ’em it’s impossible. You got to lay out all of your desires and wishes and dreams, no matter how big or how small this person gets to do that too.

Everything that they want for themselves. Being transparent, being open and honest, this is what I want. And listen, it could be the complete opposite of yours and that is okay. So don’t try to, like, make this match up or don’t try to make them wrong. You could say, I want someone to cook for me every day. And they could say, I want someone to cook for me every day.

So don’t play into it. Just let each person have their desired wish list and no limits. Give them time. Don’t smirk. Cheer ’em on. That’s amazing. That sounds great. Oh, because you’re going to learn something about this person that I promise you. You were not open to hearing before just by doing the exercise.

So you have your wish list. They have their wish list. Let ’em get all the way down. Is there anything else? Is there anything you missed? Maybe even giving them some ideas. You know, you can put anything you want and once they are complete with theirs, you guys are going to decide together. You’re going to look at yours and they will agree if they can comply or not.

Like there’s no way I can agree to that. There’s no way I’m going to do that. And so, you’ll have recognition of this so you can draw a line through it, you can have a discussion about it. Because the third row is for what do we want together and what are we willing to negotiate in order to have that. So an example could be all of the things that I want.

And then my husband would list all of the things that he wants. He wants a normal, stable, quiet life. He doesn’t want to be challenged. He doesn’t want to be, his feathers ruffled. He doesn’t want to be pushed to the edges where you guys know… he married the wrong person. Right? So what else does he need to feel safe and calm?

He wants to watch TV in the morning. He wants to have coffee before anyone in the house wakes up. He wants to go to the gym. He wants to go to bed early. As soon as he gets dark, he’s ready for bed. He wants to wake up early. He wants to have a simple life where he feeds the animals. He takes care of very little things, and the older he gets, the less he wants to take care of.

He, he tells me all this, so that’s what’s on his list. So you can see how my list and his list do not look like they’re going to match, right? So this is where the third comes in. When he says, like, if I’m like, I want to travel and I want to be gone for 30, 60, or ninety days, he’s like, absolutely not. Four days max for me.

Got it. See how it’s different? And I, when I travel, I just want to go off the cuff and end up wherever I end up. He wants a plan. He wants to know where we’re stopping, where we’re sleeping, when we’re leaving again, how many hours we’re going to drive. I’m like, oh, for God’s sakes, let’s just go. Right? So we’re so opposite.

So the third I’m like, Hey, what do we want? Me and you, what do we want? We want to keep our family together. We want to have an intimate relationship with our kids and grandkid. We want to have certain things paid off. We want to simplify some of the responsibilities as we get older. We want to have our finances and business taken care of so our kids don’t have to deal with it.

We want a clean yard; we want clean vehicles. We want great credit; the credit score. We want cash available on hand for anything that we want. We want, trying to think, we want things clean. We, we want to be healthy. We both respect our physical bodies. We want to eat clean, healthy. We want to go to the gym or have great exercise equipment.

We want to have nice vehicles; we want to always have good tires on our vehicles. Those are things that we want. Those are things that are important to us. We want low maintenance. I think that’s pretty much the priority. Something may come to mind after I get off of this. So you can see how I want liberation and freedom.

I want to do whatever the heck I want to do. I want you to love me doing whatever it is that I want to do, whether you like it or not. So mine’s kind of somewhat impossible and then his is somewhat impossible. But what works for us is the “what we want” list is so powerful that we’re willing to negotiate some of the things that we can’t give each other and get it met somewhere else or within ourself because the endgame is most important.

So I. And this is, I’m not saying we’re perfect guys. I, we took us a long time to figure this out. And I’m 30. I think we’re thirty-three years married, thirty- five together. And whew, we have died a lot of times. I am not the person that I was; he is not the person that he is. He’s more, he’s more the same than I am. I can promise you that.

So, knowing what our why is, knowing what our, what we are mutual about, and having those as the priority makes everything else tolerable. So, you could use this example in business. Like your why is so strong, is so important that you’re willing to negotiate. Like maybe it’s working more hours than you want to.

Maybe it’s doing social media, maybe you’re going to have to get comfortable with sales. Maybe you’re going to have to ask people questions that like, Hey, do you want to come and do this with me? There’s things you’re going to have to negotiate in order to get the thing that you want. And so if you want to change generational cycles, like that’s what I want to do.

I want to like rip out the old patterns and plant new ones. And I want to see my kids and grandkids left in a world better than I found it. And that’s important enough to me that I’m willing to tolerate social media rejection, working crazy hours, losing people in relationships and people being mad at me, talking crap on me, putting me down online. Like I’m willing to tolerate all of that to be in the public eye because what I do want as a whole is so important. I’m willing to trade in being comfortable for discomfort so that I can get that agreement. Does that make sense of how I connected that? So you can do this with it just with yourself.

Like, hope I didn’t confuse y’all. Do it with your partner. Come into the More Than Mindset group and we can do the other one together. So first aisle, what do I want? And there are no limits. Anything and everything that you want, even if it’s impossible with this person that’s on the second rope. The second is everything that they want, all the way to their biggest dreams.

The third is, what do we want together in this relationship? What is important to you and important to me that we both agree on? What do we agree on already? What do we both want? Maybe it’s only one thing. Maybe it’s only three things. Maybe it’s fifteen things. The things that we want. There’s more of what we want together than what each other wants, if that makes sense.

Like we have a lot of things that we are aligned with because we put family and God and simplicity and transparency and faith, like we put all those things as a priority and we agree on ’em so strongly that it outweighs what we don’t agree. Does that make sense? Okay. So you have to give up something to have something else, is what I’m trying to tell you.

That’s the point of this. I’m calling this the relationship triad because that’s the three things. What do I want? What am I willing to give up in order to get it? That’s the relationship triad. What does he want? What do I want? What do they want and what do we want? I, they, we, together. And in the, we, you have to both agree on it.

It can’t just be one, like, we agree about wanting our kids to, uh, experience us as an example. There’s, there’s, there’s other ones. I won’t mention everything, but I just want to give you the foundation of how to do this and come into the Facebook group will have a conversation about it. And if you aren’t aware, we have Belief Bootcamp Online and Belief Bootcamp in person that’s coming up in March and April.

And I want to make sure that you know about it because this is where we work through all these limiting beliefs. This is where we get really clean about what we want and if it’s possible to have it. We’ve got to get all the disbelief cleaned up, we’ve got to do all the unlearning. We’ve got to get all of that conditioning out of the way so that we can become pure within ourself, so that we can have the confidence, so that we can have the courage to ask or to state what we want and what we are personally responsible for in order to get it.

So I hope that was helpful. The relationship triad: this is what, this is what they want, this is what we want. And the we is the cement. The we is the martyr. The we is what holds it together and makes the negotiations tolerable. If you do have a partner or a friend that you want to do this with, share the podcast with them.

Share this episode with them and say, listen, let’s do this project together. And you sit down, and you’ll probably just take thirty minutes and then you guys can daydream about what else do I want? What else do I want? And then when you come together with that, what we want together, God, it is so powerful.

This is what keeps my team and I together. We’re so clear about what we want together. So I know what I want and what Mallory wants and what she and I want together because we have a specific agreement and plan for her future. I know what I want, what Emily wants, and what we want together. And the same thing with Monique and the same thing with my clients.

They make an agreement with me when they come to work with me. I’m like, okay. This is what I want to help you do. And they’re like, this is what I’m willing to do. This is what I’m willing. This is what I want. Right? Because they’re like, I want it to be easy. I want to have time off. I want to make this much money.

I want to do this certain thing. Like they’re so clear about what they want, and then we come to the what do we want? We both want them to be a success. Great. See, we found something to agree on. We want them to build a business that is in alignment with the life that they want to live. Boom, we both want that.

What else do we want? We want them to feel satisfied, successful, and joyful. Great. We both agree. I want that for you. You want that for you. It goes on the, we both want this list. We want to continue working together as long as it feels good for both of. Boom. There’s another we. Got it? All right, guys. Have fun with this.

Do it with everyone you love and make sure you do it with your clients. Whenever they sign up with you, get clear about it right out the gate. Make this determination because you’re going to come back to this when the relationship gets rocky. When things start getting hard, it’s a reminder. It’s like, oh, remember we’re doing it because of this.

Remember like this, you’re willing to negotiate or to let go of, and you don’t need it to be different or me to be different in. To have what we want together because what we want together is so much more important and so much more powerful. Okay, have fun.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than Mindset.