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Hello everyone, and welcome to the Marriage Life Coach Podcast. I am Maggie Reyes. I am so excited to share episode one. Let’s do this. Today, I wanted to give you all an overview of what the show is going to be about and dive into one of my core concepts that I am calling the relationship table. So, the relationship table is going to be so much fun to talk about and how understanding how your relationship table works, will help you have a better marriage right now. You will see throughout the episodes of this podcast that I really focus on the present and the future and how you can implement these things today, not later today, tomorrow. Now my intention for the whole podcast is really to share actionable and inspiring concepts and resources that will help you change your relationship for the better and have some fun along the way.
That’s really what I want all of this work to be about. So let’s dive in. The relationship table is a round side table with three legs, and a round top and I want you to, and this is very important because when I was talking to my husband about the relationship table, he said, “No, no a table has to have four legs,” and he’s an engineer and seeing many tables. I’m like, “No, it’s one of those cute little side tables with three legs.” So listen, my table has three legs. It’s circular, it’s lovely, it’s beautiful. Imagine the most beautiful table you could have. This is what this table is. Okay, so the three legs are the same for everyone as is the top of the table and this is what they are: Perspective, partnership and pleasure. In order to have any relationship thrive, especially in marriage, you need these three things.
I’m going to break these down in significant detail in this episode to just sit back, relax and we’re going to make a table together, and you’re going to see how it all comes together in the end. So perspective is a healthy perspective point of view or perspective as a point of view and self awareness around how you are looking at the things happening in your marriage right now; the events, the actions, the things are happening between you and your honey. That is how we look at what’s happening, perspective. Partnership is a sense of teamwork and togetherness like we’re in this together kind of vibe. And pleasure is, I define it for our purposes in this podcast and in my work is not false pleasure, but true soul satisfying pleasure. So if we think of long-term goals versus short pleasure, we’re always looking at the long-term pleasure, the soul satisfying pleasure, which sometimes is something very simple, but it’s something that feels true like it just makes your heart even bigger and we’ll talk more about that as we go.
If we look at perspective, partnership and pleasure from the point of view of actions, here’s how we would say that. We would say question your assumptions. When you question your assumptions, you improve your ability to have a perspective that is useful. We would say for partnership, cultivate friendships. So you make it a point to cultivate and spend time nourishing the friendship in your marriage. Question, your assumptions, cultivate friendship and then prioritize fun. And again, when I say fun, I mean like nourishing or true pleasure, that is… could be lighthearted fun. It could be prioritizing just playing a game, having a game night or going out on a date or watching a movie together or having an activity together, anything like that. But it’s really fun that’s meaningful to you, right? It’s not meaningless fun, it’s meaningful fun. So when I was writing my notes for this episode, I wrote this down, it said the top of the table is decision and then in my notes I put ambivalence never won an Oscar.
So I want to talk about this a little bit. When you make a decision about the type of marriage you want to have, the type of wife you want to be, the type of person you want to be in your relationships with other people, you make a decision and you move forward into that decision, and perspective, partnership and pleasure help you live that decision in your life as the activities and events of your life. And when I wrote ambivalence, never won an Oscar, when you think about actors and actresses, I think they’re just fun examples to use. So I use fun examples as often as possible. When you think of actors and actresses, when they win an Oscar for a role, they were super sure of who that person was they were portraying and what nervous ticks they had and how they spoke and how they dressed and how they walked and how they were going to transform themselves into that character.
When you’d see a performance where they’re sort of inconsistent and they’re not totally sure who’s doing what and when and how, and it comes across in the movie, we’ve all kind of seen those movies where you’re like, you know, I remember a movie recently where one of the actresses had like a British accent in the beginning of the movie, and then in the middle of the movie, she had no accent. I’m like, what is happening with this person? Still ambivalence never won an Oscar. Ambivalence never gave you a thriving marriage. And I know a lot of the women that I talk to and the reason I’m spending time on it, have ambivalence. They have this feeling where I don’t know, should I stay or should I go? How much should I work on this? What should I do? I know that if you’re listening to a podcast called the marriage life coach podcast, you are probably asking yourself some really important questions in your relationship right now and what I’m inviting you to do as you listen to this podcast, is to just decide who you want to be as an experiment.
Maybe you want to be loving, maybe you want to be kind. Maybe you want to be powerful. Like there’s no, let’s take it as a, as a hypothesis that there’s no wrong choice. You could just choose today. I will be powerful. Let that be your decision and then see if you are being powerful today, what perspective would you have? How would you cultivate friendship? How would you create true pleasure for yourself or for your relationship? And let that decision guide you . And we’ll, I’m sure I’ll have another episode just on decision coming up, but for now just sort of be with like what if there were no wrong choices and I could just choose something that feels right to me, like being loving, being generous, being forgiving, being kind or being powerful. And everything that I talk about in this podcast will in some way tie back to these themes, to perspective, partnership, pleasure and then that over arching decision that we’re making about who we want to be in our lives and in our marriages.
Now, let’s go back to perspective and let’s just notice that for this table, if we lose perspective, the table falls. If you stop having fun, the table falls. If we don’t cultivate friendship, the table falls. If we don’t decide our marriage is important, the original decision at the top of the table, the table falls. So for some of you, I know you’re super successful at work, you think about work a lot. Some of you are super healthy, run marathons, eat healthy. You think about health a lot. One of my clients is a pilot and she thinks about flying a lot. I’m inviting you to take the time that you listen to this podcast and the activities we do after the podcasts, sometimes they’ll have downloads for you and different things to help you take your work deeper. I’m inviting you to take this time to think about your marriage as deeply and as powerfully as you think about the things you’re really successful at in your life already.
So to have perspective about our marriage, we need to think about our marriage and think about how we think about our marriage. Yes, we need to think about our own thinking and for this we have to come off of autopilot. We can’t just put this into cruise control and as I was preparing this episode, I talked to my husband about why perspective is so easy for us. Like I always think about my own relationship is like this little lab like why is this particular thing that seems hard for other people, why does, why is this working for us? And I try to like take it apart and understand it better. And my husband is not a coach, he’s an engineer, very smart, very analytical, and so I love getting his take on things. And his answer was so simple. He’s like, well, because we cultivate it daily, we cultivate, you know, our connection and how we want to be.
And it really got me thinking as we were having that conversation. I thought about the flowers in a garden. So if you think about, just imagine a beautiful garden with beautiful flowers, freshly planted, let’s make that your wedding day, right? Imagine your favorite flowers, your favorite colors for flowers. It’s just blooming. It’s just stunning. It’s amazing. Everyone thinks they’re amazing. You see it, it’s beautiful. And then imagine that that garden that starts out being absolutely stunning can have two possible outcomes. You ignore the garden and the weeds start growing and you stop looking at it. You even stop noticing the flowers aren’t growing anymore. You just see weeds and you just start getting used to like, this is a garden that has lots of weeds. And then one day you’re like, this garden then has been overrun with weeds and in order to get the garden back, you don’t just have to take out all the weeds.
You have to take them out and you have to replant, the whole garden. That’s what I’m talking about in your marriage, if it feels like a struggle, if it feels stressful, if you have stuff going on that you’re not delighted by. Some of you have weeds everywhere and you want a beautiful garden and some of you want it by tomorrow, but even though we can call up a flower service and get fully bloomed flowers, right, delivered to our home, we can’t just order fully bloomed flowers for your marriage. For your marriage, all we can order are the seeds. It’s all we can do. We can just get more seeds, so all you can do is rip out the weeds and then reseed that garden and water it and talk to the flowers, tell them how beautiful they are, how awesome they are, right? Give it nourishing soil to all of those things, right?
In order for that garden to bloom again. Now the other option is to tend to the garden regularly. So some of you guys have great relationships and you’re just like, I know in order for my relationship to continue being great, I need to tend to my garden. So you listen to the show and you’re just like, “Oh yeah, I’m just going to pour love into my flowers.” You don’t have to reseed. You don’t have to pull out all the weeds. You have a little weed here and there. You pull it out, you’re good. Okay, so the flowers here also represent three things. You, your honey and your relationship. Those are three things that have to be watered. There are three different entities and you have to nurture all three of them. So one of the things that I will be doing in the podcast is sharing examples from my own life and sharing experiences with some of these things that my clients are going through so that you can start seeing what becomes possible for you.
Kind of like the four minute mile, if somebody ran, you know, ran that mile, you can run it too. If somebody has a thriving, amazing marriage that they absolutely love, you can have it too. If someone turned around a really difficult relationship, you can have it too. That’s something I really want to model for you and give you examples of, because when I was growing up, I didn’t really have those kind of examples. I was an adult when I met the first couple that I could say they have a relationship that I would aspire to have that I would wish to have someday. I’ll tell you all the story about that couple because they’re amazing and it’s a really cool story about, so that’s one of the things that I will share and here’s a story that I want to share that kind of illustrates perpective, partnership and pleasure in the form of how we live our day to day life.
And so here’s how we tend to our garden. So I absolutely love Oprah. I didn’t plan it this way, but I’m so happy that I get to mention Oprah on my first episode because if you follow me for any length of time, you will see that in my life, all roads lead to Oprah. She’s literally one of the reasons I became a life coach, which is another super fun story for another day. So I love Oprah. She’s on tour this year as I record this, it’s 2020 and she’s doing her 2020 vision tour and I went to her event and I invited my hubby and he joined me and it was amazing. Now he does not love Oprah as much as I do and it was a whole day of Oprah, people. So there were parts of the day that he took his phone out and just read articles and did things that interested him and he dipped in and out of my world and my experience of learning from what Oprah was teaching. He found some of it super useful.
Some of it he didn’t find this useful and when he didn’t find it as useful, he watered his own plant. Right? He kept nourishing himself. When the activity we were engaged in wasn’t as nourishing for him. And I’ll be talking a lot about how we make meaning in this show, but I did not make it mean anything about me or anything about Oprah. Oprah is no less fabulous just because some parts of what Oprah is teaching do not appeal to my husband. Oprah is still wonderful. My husband is still wonderful and he doesn’t have to be interested in everything that she says and that was a great experience for us to share and we cultivated connection and we will talk about it after. It was awesome, ‘kay. Now my hubby loves adventure. The way that I love Oprah and I do not love adventure at all.
I’m a very risk-averse in general human being. So a friend of his, recently asked him to go skiing and I’ve never skied. I have a lot going on in my life and my business right now, and I have no desire at this chapter of my life to learn to ski. I always say that could change in the future, but right now it’s just not something that I really want to spend any time on at all. So he told me about his friend inviting him to go skiing. And my immediate reaction is, you should absolutely go, I don’t think I should go, but you should go. And we’re both super excited about his ski trip and we were talking about that trip and while he’s away I will go get a massage. And now I’m super excited about when he’s away, because when he’s away
I’ll go do that. And I signed up for one of those prepaid services where you get a massage like once a month. I have like nine months of massages pending. It’s like, sad. I have to insert some massage time in my perspective, partnership and pleasure for my P I have to prioritize the massage time. So another thing I want to share with you throughout the whole podcast is that I am practicing and living through the things I’m talking about. I don’t live on some magic mountain where everything is just magically perfect for me and I have it all figured out. I am really good at some things and have to really make a lot of effort at others. And I’ll share, you know, sort of some of those different things as we go along just to show you that you can really have a loving, thriving relationship with many mistakes along the way.
So my husband is going on his ski trip. I had met Oprah time. We are planning a cruise together at the end of the year, which we’re both super excited about and looking forward to, and I’m so happy that we planned it at the end of last year ’cause then we have the whole year to just look forward to it and live in that anticipation and in that enjoyment. And we’re taking the time and energy to nourish the things that are important to us individually and as a team. So we’re weaving in and out of perspective and partnership and pleasures throughout the way that we prioritize the things that we spend time on. And I want you to see how you can do that, where you can inject enjoyment into the small moments as you go along. You can cultivate friendship even as you may disagree on a particular course of action or a particular activity.
You can disagree and be delighted. It’s possible to do that. I know it doesn’t feel like it’s always possible, but it is possible to do that and I think that’s so, so important. When you think about perpective, partnership and pleasure and the top of the table being decision. Those three legs hold up, whatever you have decided and whatever you have decided goes into the energy that holds up those three legs. It’s like a living system, so to speak, and you can run any kind of relationship through this framework, through this idea of a relationship table. You can think about your team at work if there’s a lot of strife on a particular team, what’s the perspective, how’s teamwork being cultivated? Where is the fun or the joy in the work that’s being done? Usually you can narrow it down to one of those pieces and then you know exactly what to work on because it’s one of those pieces that needs to be addressed or fortified,
it’s like need to give it a vitamin kind of thing. You can run this through any relationship with a family member. What’s the perspective I’m holding? How am I cultivating connection? When was the last time I had fun with this person or in this community or as part of this group? And when you look at those three things, perspective, partnership, and pleasure, when all of those three legs are the same length, they’re all on point. They’re all working as designed. That’s where you get to thriving. And one of the things I will talk about is the idea of thriving your marriage, not just surviving, not just making it to tomorrow. Sometimes you just got to make it through the day. I know, but the goal is to be a thriving and I really set the intention that I want my community to be exceptional and not average.
So my code, my terminology that I like to use for thriving, is five-star. Thinking about a five star experience, a five star hotel, a luxury of any kind, and episode three is going to be all about what a five-star marriage is and how to have one, so look out for that one. But in the meantime, really think about perspective, partnership and pleasure as three keys that will unlock the goodness in any relationship that you want to improve right now just by looking through and seeing which one of these needs a tweak and the way I like to help you do that is to use some questions. What is your attitude about your marriage and your honey today? If you want your marriage to be stronger, what is the perspective that will help you get there? What is the outlook that will help you get there?
One of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, who founded The Life Coach School, which is where I trained. She says it so simply and so beautifully. She says, your thoughts about your marriage are your marriage. I’m going to repeat that because it’s so powerful. Your thoughts about your marriage are your marriage. So if we take that as true, which I will show you throughout this podcast how it is, but let’s just take it as true. What is your most predominant thought about your marriage right now? Like just stop and think. What is your most predominant thought about your marriage right now and how will keeping that thought affect your marriage 10 years from now? If we keep thinking the way we’re thinking today, does that get us where we want to go in the future? So my thought about my marriage is it’s the best thing I ever did.
I love being married. I think that all the time. I tell people that all the time, I will tell you all, all the time and 10 years from now that thought will be continuing to produce more thoughts just like it. I love being married. It’s the best thing I ever did. And what happens is that’s like what’s on my decision table. And so when I look for perspective, partnership and pleasure, I create more to support that thought through that lens. And now I want to switch a little bit to talking about cultivating friendship and how important that is. Um, that’s the partnership side of the three legs on my beautiful round table and I have this thing in my Better Marriage Masterclass, which is a webinar that I do, I’ll link to it in the show notes where I take one of the points and I call it “always be friending.”
So I’m on Facebook, I love Facebook. I have a Facebook group, it’s called The Better Marriage Club. It’s for women only by the way. And when you’re on Facebook, when you like someone’s posts, you see more of their posts. When you comment on their posts, you see more of their posts in your feed. When you share their posts, you see more of them. And so I think about our relationship with our partners as always be friending, like always be commenting, engaging with that person. And then you’ll see more of them, you’ll experience more of them. And that’s what I mean when they talk about partnership. How are we in partnership with each other? How are we supporting each other, how are we helping each other through life? It’s like the garden. We can ignore it, but if we do, the weeds will grow and they will take over. And I absolutely love the research that the Gottman Institute does on what makes relationship effective and they’re a huge influence in my work as The Life Coach School is as well.
And I will quote them often and I’m so excited, I’m going to talk about one of their concepts today, and they use the term “the drift.” So imagine the ocean and you and your honey are floating in the ocean and the natural outcome of two people floating in an ocean is that you will drift away from each other. If no other forces are acting upon you and you’re just there in the ocean, you will drift away. In order to stay on track together, while you are floating, you must make the effort to turn towards each other repeatedly, over and over and over again. Or the natural drift of the ocean will take over. Just like in the garden. If we’re not pulling the weeds out, the weeds will take over and then you’ll have all the weeds and no flowers, right? In my universe, the way I talk about marriage, for you to get to thriving, I suggest that you don’t just turn towards each other. I suggest that you actually hold hands part of the time. Hey, I have spoken with hundreds of women about their marriages over the last few years and when relationships are struggling, I ask them, how much time are they spending with their honey? And the relationships that struggle the most? It’s often almost none.
So this is so, so, so important that you just take a note. Like right now you’re listening to me. Think about how much time you spent with your honey. Together time, not time with the kids, helping family, doing community projects or other things that you’re working on, but time together just with each other. Just cultivating your own teamwork together. So even as you’re adjusting your perspective, like even if you haven’t figured out all the things you need to figure out, you might have some stuff to forgive, you might have some things you’re going through even as that’s going on. What I encourage you to do is to start cultivating friendship, start turning towards each other and away from the drift and start now while you’re still figuring out exactly what you want your perspective to be, like, don’t wait to have that all figured out.
Just do it now. And as you’re thinking about your marriage and making steps to cultivate friendship, you also start prioritizing pleasure both together and apart. So one of my hypothesis is that in our modern urban society, we often overwork and under celebrate. I see this a lot over and over again in so many of my clients and my community, I’ve seen it in myself over the years. We’re always onto what’s next, right? And then we’re seduced by all kinds of false pleasures. And then we feel empty, like this vast void of emptiness that never fully feels full still. We think it can’t get full because it hasn’t ever felt full. But what I propose to you is that we’re filling it with the wrong things and what I invite you to do when you think of true pleasure, the way we’re defining it here together, it’s not the false pleasure of over-consuming, it’s the true type of pleasure that it feels nourishing to your soul, right?
Like when you have a really delicious meal and you feel full, but you feel full in such a good way. That’s the type of pleasure that whenever I referred to the concept of pleasure is what I’m talking about. Now, that will be different for all of you and it will be a mix of tiny moments and Epic moments. Maybe quietly reading a book, calling a friend, taking a walk, or planning an Epic ski trip with your buddies, right? And enjoying the anticipation of the trip the whole time. I know a lot of you feel exhausted and overwhelmed and will say to me, but I don’t have time for that, Maggie.
I know my clients have said that to me and when I’m telling you is that if you don’t make the time, you are risking your marriage. You are risking your emotional wellness. You are playing with fire. Think that through for a second. You are playing with fire if you don’t make the time. I also encourage do-ability. Is this do-able? In all my work, I run it through my “is this do-able lens” and so here’s what I want to say: If you don’t have an hour to take five minutes, right? If you have 20 minutes, take 20 minutes. If you can do something once a week but not every day, then do it once a week. Whatever you can do, it doesn’t matter where you start, it just matters you decide and make small tweaks one tweak at a time. That certainly matters. So I know there’s some big concepts in this episode and I want to make it really simple for you.
So I’m going to ask you three questions. I’m going to read them to you now and then I will have these questions as a simple download for you on the show notes and you can find the show notes at maggiereyes.com/podcast/1. And so this is the Relationship Table Worksheet. It is literally four questions. It’s super simple so it’s super doable, but hopefully they will inspire some deep thinking in your heart. So here we go. Decision, the top of the table. What do I need to decide right now that will help me be more of the woman I want to be and the wife I want to embody? What do I need to decide right now to help me be more of the woman I want to be and the wife I want to embody?
It can simply be I decide to spend five minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever it is, making my marriage better. I commit to improving my perspective. It could be as simple as that, so don’t overthink this either. Perspective. What is one thing I can choose to think about my marriage right now that will help it get stronger? Just pick one thing that feels do-able today, okay? Tweaks, count, small tweaks or count. You don’t have to make it a big epic leap. How can it create an opportunity to connect this week? That’s the question for partnership. How can I create an opportunity to connect this week? What do I need to cancel, reschedule, postpone? Where is the space? What am I going to de-prioritize so I prioritize my marriage? And then for pleasures, how can I bring the fun to whatever I’m focusing on in my life and relationship right now?
How can I bring the fun? And then bring the fun. First we ask how and then we do it? Okay, so those four questions will be on the Relationship Table Worksheet. You’ll find that MaggieReyes.com. And I hope that you find that super, super, super useful. I am so excited to say that’s a wrap on episode one of The Marriage Life Coach podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Next up, I will teach you how to use powerful questions like the ones I shared today to help you create any result in your life. So definitely stay tuned for episode two on power questions. I’ll see you soon.