Episode 153- Strengthening Your Marriage By Using Your Intuition
I sat down with a student of the Marriage MBA, Ashley Delbello, who also happens to be an intuitive life and business coach for women. Ashley specializes in helping women with people-pleasing, perfectionism, burnout and self-doubt reconnect to themselves. You can visit her website here.
As women, it’s easy for us to get disconnected from our intuitive inner wisdom. We tend to prioritize everyone’s needs ahead of our own, which naturally leads us away from ourselves. When it comes to our relationships, not being in touch with our true desires can create miscommunication and frustration.
Ashley and her honey had been to marriage therapy and found that, while it helped, she wanted something MORE.
She needed an intentional space where she could create and cultivate the marriage she truly wanted. So what nudge from her intuition helped her choose The Marriage MBA program? Hearing about the concept of the power of one.
You’re going to love our conversation.
The impact of intuition on strengthening your marriage
I love that Ashley’s title starts with ‘intuitive.’ I talk all the time about listening to the nudges from our own inner wisdom, even if we’re not sure where it will lead. So I had to ask Ashley about what intuition means to her and how she uses it.
“A lot of who we truly are is seated within our inner wisdom and our inner wisdom comes from our intuition,” Ashley said.
“We, especially as women, get disconnected from that and we’re told not to trust our gut. What it looks like for me is being able to connect back with yourself and being able to listen to those nudges and being able to see that that’s what is truly going to give us the life we love. We’re creating from our own values and from what we actually want and desire in our life.”
That made total sense to me, because the best way to start strengthening your marriage is to know yourself and your truest desires first.
Simple ways to practice tuning into our intuition
Maybe it’s been so long since we asked ourselves what we truly wanted or what we truly thought about something that… we don’t know. We got so used to prioritizing what everyone else wants that we forgot we’re allowed to want something, too – even if it’s something different. Different than what we usually want, or different from what our partner wants.
What if we’ve been disconnected from our inner wisdom and we’re not sure we’d recognize our intuition?
“It may sound a little abstract, but sometimes it’s just starting to notice and create that space for it,” Ashley said.
“Noticing when you have a nudge, even if it’s the smallest thing, like ‘Oh, I need to go check the door again,’ and then doing that. Or if you’re driving and the GPS says to go right, but you think you should go left, follow that and see what happens.
Just sitting with yourself for a moment and seeing what comes up, that’s helping you start to reconnect.”
I think that desire and intuition go hand in hand, so one of my easiest steps for practicing tuning into intuition is identifying those wants. What do I want to have for dinner? What do I want to wear today? Follow those nudges about what you desire and you’ll rebuild that connection to your inner wisdom one step at a time.
Remembering the power of one in our relationships
One of my favorite things was how Ashley’s intuition led her to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
“We had tried couple’s therapy. It helped, we learned some stuff… but I needed an intentional space for me to cultivate the marriage that I wanted.
I just love how you and a lot of your communications within The Marriage MBA is the power of one. That we can cultivate the marriage that we want, starting with us and starting with ourselves.
After going through couple therapy with my husband, I was just like, I think we need to do this separately. Like you, you go to therapy and I’m going to do The Marriage MBA.”
The power of one to me is such a fascinating thing to, to just think about because. So much in our society, we’re like ‘It takes two to tango,’ and those kinds of messages, and yet what about all these amazing inventors and philosophers? Or Oprah!
So really, the power of one always comes back to asking ourselves, what power do I have right here and now? Am I using it? And then letting our intuition weigh in.
Reconnection to your intuition is a reconnection to your values
Being more you in your marriage is the core message of my coaching career. Ashley weighed in on the role the program played in helping her experience deeper connection and be more of herself in her relationship.
“Writing out our vision statement based on some of our values stuck with me for a while. I’m a coach, so I’ve done core values and visions and manifestos and all of that, but never really for my marriage, and never had thought about it like that.
Just writing out that vision statement and what I wanted in my marriage was a kickoff to how I want to be operating in my marriage. If these are the values I have, then yeah, I do need to be speaking up and talking to my husband in a way that is different.”
Identifying how you want to be in your marriage sounds so simple, but it’s such deeply important work. It’s another good way to practice tapping into our inner wisdom and following where it leads.
Leaning on your intuition to repair ruptures in your relationship
“One of the biggest things is normalizing that not everything’s going to be perfect and we’re not always going to be in sync with our partners, whether it’s sexually or emotionally or whatever,” Ashley said. “It’s okay. It doesn’t mean your marriage is doomed.”
That’s the part we don’t talk about enough in our society – we have different thoughts about finances and sex and how we should do different things, and what our priorities can be, or where we want to go on vacation from the most mundane to the most sublime things in life.
The reason you’re with this person is because they’re fascinating and different from you. Then we’re like, why are they so different from me? That’s what made them interesting to you! Like we forget that there was a reason.
So if we can come to a place where it is completely part of being married… you can use your intuition to decide what’s okay and what isn’t.
In relationship psychology, it’s called rupture and repair. Because despite what society loves to say about what makes a good relationship, we will still disappoint each other, we’ll be upset about things, we’ll process things differently. That part is a given. The repair part is, what do we want to do with that? And that’s a little bit of something we have to find our own way. It’s really using your intuition to decide.
Learn more about strengthening your marriage with coaching
If you want to stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school. It helps you reimagine marriage, so you can have a relationship that works for you.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for years to come.
If there is a foundation of love in your marriage and you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you. Use the link above to apply today. The application itself is quick and simple, but deep and powerful, and designed to give you more clarity about how you can move your relationship forward.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: