Hello superstars. Today we are going to dive right in and talk about the daily check-in and why it matters. This is a super simple concept that you can implement right away, but listen up. Simple does not equal easy. If simple equals easy, then no one on earth would be overweight or in debt or have stressful marriages, right? Eat less is simple but not easy. Spend less is simple but not easy. Talk more in the right way about a better combination of things like we’re going to talk about today is simple but sometimes it is very, very far away from easy. Now I of course I’m going to give you my best life coaching hacks to make it easier for you so I got you, but just remember it’s okay if it feels hard, your marriage is worth it. Now let’s talk about the daily check in.
Because I have been promoting my book, the questions for couples journal, I have been talking a lot lately about talking. And I have been talking about talking with my clients as well. And I have seen a pattern emerge and I really want to share it with you today. So oftentimes when a wife comes to me for a consultation for coaching and she’s struggling and I ask questions and I try to figure out what’s going on to determine how I can help her or what resources I might recommend. A theme that comes up very often is she doesn’t feel seen or heard or loved in the relationship. And when I ask about what kinds of conversations she’s having with her husband, they often fall into two categories. I have named them cause they’re like naming things. I call them maintenance and problems. So think about the last week, the last month. Think about all the most recent conversations you’ve had with your honey.
Think about how many of them were about goals or dreams or deepest desires or passions or delights, and how many of them were about maintenance? Like the mortgage, the credit card bill, the kids, the parents-in-law the cousins. How many of those conversations were about problems, maybe how to deal with the pandemic, working from home, broken appliances, name a problem. You get the idea. Our refrigerator fan broke in the middle of this delightful pandemic and that was lots of fun. We had lots of conversations about that. When your conversations only revolve around maintenance and problems, it’s like that famous quote, I had to use it. You guys, forgive me, Houston, we have a problem. So how do you solve that issue? What do you do if, all you’re talking about most of the time is maintenance and problems. The first thing is the daily check-in and the second thing, which I’m also going to talk about today, is to think about conversations like highways.
Imagine a freeway in Los Angeles with all those lanes and then imagine a dirt road. You want a nice strong highway with lots of lanes open for great communication and problem solving lanes, you want those lanes, but you also want the sexy times lane, the goals and dreams lane. You want to know you can bring up anything and talk about it in a way that helps you create the results you want in your life and in your relationship. And the way you do that if you don’t already have that going on right now, is to start simple and small and take your dirt roads and build them out into highways. So the daily checking itself is super simple. You ask one question, how was your day? Hello, my dearest darling. How was your day? I want to know. Okay, back in 2012 a long time ago, I read an article in Red Book Magazine, which is absolutely one of my favorite magazines and that article was a total game changer for my brain.
So just imagine 2012 I was there reading my Red Book and they had one of those little sort of mini articles and a marriage counselor named Sharon Rivkin. Hello Sharon Rivkin. I love you. She said that 90% of the couples she sees that are having serious problems have stopped asking the magic question, how was your day? She went on to say, those words are actually as important as saying I love you because they help maintain the compassion a marriage needs to survive. I just need to read that again cause that was really brilliant asking how was your day, right? That simple, simple question is as important as saying, I love you because asking that question cultivates compassion in your marriage. How cool is that? So I like to boldly declare it the one question that can save your marriage, just for fun. And I’m going to take you on a little detour with me as we think about the daily check in and why it matters.
And then we’re going to come back around to why that question is so important. And I think this detour, will really illustrate for you why it’s so important. So imagine for a moment that you turned on Netflix or your favorite thing you like to watch and you picked five movies and you only watched the last 15 minutes of each movie. Let’s say in one movie someone wins a gold medal at the end. Then another movie, there’s a big kiss and another you see a car speeding off into a beautiful horizon and another movie the heroin runs across New York city in heels of course, and looking spectacular with great lipstick to tell the hero that he waited too long. He was kind of dweeby in the middle, but she loves him anyway. Right? Seriously. How many movies have you seen where the people are running across some big city to declare their undying devotion?
I think I have seen all of those movies ever made and I love them all. Give me all the movies where people are running and in love, I will take it, but just imagine that you did that. You watched the end of five movies watching the end of the movie is no fun if you don’t see all the steps that got you to the big sprint at midnight, the couple who couldn’t stand each other and now they can’t stand to be apart. The kids overcoming the mean bully with a nerdy school teacher with a heart of gold who always believed, right. Those are the best parts. We would never click through channels and just watch the endings of movies. Like just think about that. That would sound so crazy. Yet in life, we want these magic pills and quick fixes and instead of actually enjoying and savoring and looking forward to this like mega blockbuster that is real life, we try to skip to the end of the movie.
So that brings us back to the daily check-in. In the daily check-in. When I think about my husband and I, my husband gets to learn about the characters in my life and the adventures that I’m having that don’t include him. And I learned about the characters in his life and the adventures that he is having that doesn’t include me. Right? And there’s even more to it than that. When I come home, if I think back to when I worked in HR and I would come home super stressed, maybe we had to fire someone that day or something went wrong with a project, something didn’t work out the last minute. Imagine that I’m coming home and I’m quiet and my mind is wandering and I’m worried about whatever happened at work. If we’re having daily check-ins all the time, he doesn’t think it’s about him. He doesn’t get anxious.
He doesn’t get hurt or worried because he knows. He knew what happened last month that led to what happened last week. That brought me to the really juicy yet annoying story that happened today. Right. And for the record, I really, you know, I like to keep it real on the show. Being a life coach does not mean you never get annoyed. If you listen to the anger scale episode, you know, I really mean that. It means that the feeling of annoyance is much shorter. You learn something from it, hopefully, right? It upsets you for 10 minutes instead of 10 days, but you still get annoyed. Right? Like a life coach is not a Saint or a Buddha. It’s just a person who knows how to manage emotions because we think about emotions all the time.
Now imagine, right? I was giving you that example. If I would home stressed and my hubby would know what was going on. So the same thing happens in reverse and my husband works in a field that is audited. I like to say every time the wind changes direction, they have another audit and sometimes during the preparation for not that he will work crazy hours, he will sleep less, he might be more quiet and more reserved. Usually it’s his mind working overtime on his thousand item to do list. Like he has project plans that sometimes have like hundreds of line items to think about, and I know this because I know the stories about the auditors, which ones are nice but from which ones are married and having babies, which ones he looks forward to seeing every year and the ones who pick apart the most inane thing just because these daily check ins that we have with each other, they are the stories of our lives sharing them.
For us it’s really sharing life, the emotions, the characters, our experience of it, what we learned, what we wanted to let go of. We joke around, that I could run it. Cause after, as I’m recording this, I’ve been married for 13 years. After 13 years of hearing about all the different projects and things that they do. I’m like, I don’t know the actual computer science of it, but I know all the project planning part of it. Right. And we also joke around that he could run HR because after so many years of hearing me with all of my updates, they had actual a meeting in his office where the person who was in charge of HR, he said, if I’m ever not available, just go to him. You’ll know what to do. Right.
So the way that we share the fabric of our life right now, we have a pretty big basic format and usually include a lot of details. So you know, we talk about our projects and things we’re working on. Some days I have been known to say I worked, let’s watch modern family, right? Other days it’s an hour long conversation with hand gestures and reenactments and show and tell and stuff like that. And my husband is my favorite person. I tell him this all the time. I want to know everything that happens to him because I care. I find his experiences in life fascinating and because I feel closer to him when we share. So I literally wrote in the Questions For Couples Journal, the dedication that I wanted to know everything about about him and I was not kidding. I literally used to say that all the time and now it’s kind of a joke because now there’s a book, there’s proof all over the world. This is how I actually think.
So asking a simple how was your day is one of the ways that you take the dirt roads of communication and you start building highways. Another way to add a layer to that is when you use a book, like the Questions For Couples Journal to ask questions and have conversations you would not normally in everyday life. So think about this. Do you set aside time to talk about your goals and dreams or your favorite board game you had when you were 12, right. More than likely you were like my clients, we talk a lot about maintenance and problems and need to talk more about dreams and desires. And this is one of the reasons I was excited to write the book in the first place when it was offered to me because coming up with questions is hard. I asked questions for a living and it was even hard for me.
So having a shortcut with different categories just makes it a thousand times easier and I love easy. The easier something is to do, the more likely you will go out and do it tonight. All about that. One question I ask my coaching clients all the time is, does this feel doable? What do you think about this? I love doability. That’s a high, high priority. So when you take a questions book and you pick up some questions, what you’re doing is you’re creating more access points for communication. You’re adding lanes to your highway and if you imagine a highway, you want lots of entry points and exit points so you can zoom in and zoom out of different types of communication and the best way to keep the highway free and clear of any obstacles is to communicate regularly about nonthreatening or non-stressful topics. That way when something more delicate comes up, you already have these well-built roads that can support the extra weight of heavy communication, right?
So if you have cars driving on the highway all the time, but that highway is reinforced and you know that you can pull like a semi-truck on that highway. It’s not going to bend. It’s not going to crumble. It’s not going to fall. Right? But that semi-truck may be on the dirt road, might have some trouble getting through. So having difficult conversations really is a topic unto itself. So I will go into depth on that on another episode. But the guidance I most often give me coaching clients if a difficult conversation is sort of on your radar to come up soon is don’t have the conversation on those. You’re totally ready to accept any answer to your question. Don’t have it unless you’re ready for any answer. If you’re super, super tied to the idea that it must be a specific answer, you are not ready to have the conversation.
So go back and listen to Requests Versus Demands. If you haven’t heard that episode yet. And Emotional Weightloss. Both of those episodes will give you the mindsets to take into a difficult conversation. If you do have one coming up soon that you can’t postpone. Now what happens when you want to start checking in daily and your partner is just not into it? I imagine you guys, when I’m writing up my notes for the episodes, they’re going to say, but Maggie, what do I do if my partner is super quiet or super reserved? Something like that. I will tell you this. Everyone I have ever met is passionate about something, even quiet people. Find out what interests them, what do they love and ask about that. Start with the easiest, simplest thing. Do I personally know more about video games than the average bear? You bet I do because my husband loves them and gets excited for new releases and I love to hear him talk when he’s excited about something.
Does he know more about personal development and coaching tools and things like that? He hell yes does! Cause I’m interested in that. Right? So I really challenge you to find the place in your heart where you actually want to know what your honey is passionate about, whether it’s something that you’re passionate about or not just as a place to start, just as a place to build connection. The more you build partnership and your relationship through friendship and points of connection, the stronger your marriage gets. For some of you, this is going to feel super easy and for others it’s going to feel very challenging. If having any kind of conversation feels hard, then that’s usually a sign of something deeper happening in the relationship where we need to peel back some layers and see what’s going on. So if that’s you and you want to figure it out, apply for coaching with me and I can help you with that. For the rest of you, go check in.
Okay. And now for a very quick client celebration, here is what Ariel had to say about her experience of coaching with me. I love sharing these. I hope that when you hear these, you really get to experience what’s possible when you commit to making your relationship stronger. So here’s what Ariel said. She said, working with Maggie was life changing and I really mean that. I came to her for help with my marriage, but ended up with a totally transformed life view. The biggest takeaway for me was that everyone can be right. I learned how to love other people for who they are and let go of thinking they need to be like me or have the same values as I do. Maggie has this amazing way of allowing you to be seen in her presence while also gently shifting your perspective to bring more love into your heart and marriage. She’s truly amazing. Thanks Ariel, it is such an honor to be part of my client’s team for pivotal chapters in their life, and it was a total honor to be part of your team for that pivotal chapter. That is a wrap for today. Remember, you need three things to have a thriving five star marriage perspective, partnership, and pleasure, and they are all in your control.