Maggie Reyes:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Marriage Life Coach Podcast. I am so excited because we’re beginning a new chapter in the podcast. This is episode 102. We’re already in the second set of hundreds of episodes.
I have a very, very special guest to join me today. Her name is Kristi Angevine. She is a board certified OB-GYN, along with being a certified Life Coach. So a healer on every level on the emotional and the physical level.
She specializes in habits and habit formation and how do you make habits stick and how do you overcome things like reflectionism and overthinking and people pleasing when you want to create a habit that you want to use to make your life amazing?
So she’s all about habits and she is a member of The Marriage MBA. She came to The Marriage MBA to work on her own habits in her marriage. I am so excited to listen to what she has to share today from her lens being one of the world’s foremost expert on habits. So welcome Kristi. Thank you for being with us today.
Kristi Angevine:
Thank you for having me. This is such a gift to be here, Maggie.
Maggie Reyes:
Okay, so let’s dive in. So I said a little bit about what you do with habits, but I always like to hear from your own words. Tell us just what do you do?
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So I’m a physician recently turned full-time Life Coach. I love looking at those hidden habits that we have, like second guessing and overthinking and taking things personally, and so I help high achieving women look at and sort of unpack to find the root causes of why they do those things.
Maggie Reyes:
That’s sounds really powerful. I love that. Yeah, it’s so good. Okay. So you were recently in one of the cohorts of The Marriage MBA, and why did you decide to join? What interested you about the program?
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So for me, my journey through finding Coaching and becoming a Coach was just so powerful because for me I had so many shifts about my thoughts about my work, about myself, about my professional and personal roles.
I’m probably going to cry thinking about this, but my marriage is one of my most important relationships in terms of the close relationships that I have. It’s one that I chose and it’s one that I really wanted to deliberately focus on and I just didn’t want it to just unfold on accident and I wanted my connection with my husband to be one that I created with intention.
I felt like having a really specific Coaching cohort focused specifically on marriage connection and the culture of marriage would be just the best way to work on it. Because it’s important to me, but I noticed that even though I would maybe Coach on things that would come up with my husband, it wasn’t something that on a daily or a weekly basis I really thought about on purpose.
Maggie Reyes:
Love that. Yeah, because you want to build habits on purpose, right? That’s what you’re all about.
Kristi Angevine:
Absolutely.
Maggie Reyes:
Habits on purpose. Okay. So you mentioned before we started recording that you had six of your favorite takeaways, six of the learnings, the things that you’re putting into practice that you’re doing now from the program, and so I wanted to hear all six, and I know everyone listening wants to hear all six. So tell us what were your six favorite takeaways?
Kristi Angevine:
Absolutely. So I try not to talk too fast because I get really excited when I think about the things that I take away from this, that I took away from The Marriage MBA. When I was thinking about them, I thought, well, I’m probably going to be able to distill out three main powerful ones, and then I just got started and I was on a roll.
So I had to take notes just to make sure I had them, but so one of the first ones that was probably one of the most powerful was learning about stress responses in the way that you taught them. I mean, I understand fight or flight, freeze, the pathophysiology that we experience in our bodies.
But I don’t think I really quite understood my own stress response and basically knew what it felt like in my body, knew what my classic signs were when I was feeling anxious and basically was in kind of a flight or freeze response. I just didn’t quite realize that or appreciate that until you explained things to me the way that you did.
So for me, once I learned about it through the lens that you taught it, I was able to label for myself what it specifically looks like for me when I’m in a stress response. This wasn’t just with my spouse, this was just me going through my day in relation to my spouse, in relation to my kids. Oh my gosh. So the takeaway was I was able to label that and then pause and not act from it.
So basically when I would feel anxious in response to my spouse, what I would do in the past is I would, and what I still kind of manage now, is I would feel anxious or I would feel stressed or I’d feel pressure and I would basically go into fix it mode and problem solving mode and trying to talk things out.
Just lots of urgent action, basically, trying to either change how my kids were behaving or change how my husband’s experience was or change our schedule, change something outside of me thinking that that was going to basically fix and make me feel better instead of just taking some time and letting myself self-regulate and then circling back to whatever the issue was later. It was probably one of the hugest things.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that so much. I think that for everyone listening, we could stop the podcast now and everybody could just know, let’s label our stress responses, and your life would be completely different if you just engaged with that one idea and just went really deep with that one idea.
That’s one of my sort of philosophies in The Marriage MBA is I want to teach you this buffet of tools, but just leaning into one can change everything. Yay that you leaned into six, that’s amazing, and we could probably talk about a bunch more.
So I just want everyone listening to think about that as you’re going about your life or as you feel, I know a lot of us, and I have felt this way, are really overwhelmed. If we can just take one thing and do one thing, think differently about one thing, engaged differently with one thing, I talk about the power of one of one person can change a marriage, but it’s also like one thing can change everything else too.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. I think maybe there’s probably seven things I took from this. Because what you just said was so powerful and you reminded us of that on almost every Coaching call is that small, incremental, consistent things implemented every single day are the very things that create more meaningful, more noticeable change.
Maggie Reyes:
Yes.
Kristi Angevine:
That’s so easy to overlook, right? Like when you’re making small little changes that just, you know, the heavens don’t open up and shine and show a rainbow when you’ve had maybe a conversation in a different way. But doing these small little things and concentrating to just applying one thing.
Maggie Reyes:
Yes.
Kristi Angevine:
There’s that tendency to overcomplicate and consume everybody’s idea or tip or trick for your marriage when it’s like, oh, you could just take one thing and apply it.
Maggie Reyes:
Just do that. Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
Just do that.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. I love that that landed so deeply. I’ve been thinking about this from the point of view of being a high achiever in any realm, right? Like you’re a high achiever in multiple realms, and many of the people who listen to us are as well, and when you’re very successful in different arenas of your life, when you’re going to go work on your personal relationships, it’s usually not a massive overhaul. There’s a lot of things that are also going right.
I like to think of it like Olympians, or I think it’s in the book Atomic Habits where they talk about the bike riders in France where they weren’t changing how they ride their bikes, they’re just like one degree difference. I’m going to change the fabric of my shorts. I’m going to see if I’m going to put this much air in the tire or that much air in the tire.
It’s like that subtle nuance of I’m going to pause and breathe when I notice I’m anxious, it’s the equivalent of that Olympic level work that it’s both that’s what Olympians do, they do the tiny things, and so it’s both a big work and a little work at the same time. What are your thoughts on that?
Kristi Angevine:
Oh, well, so first off, is my husband is really into biking and I love that you brought up that analogy.
Maggie Reyes:
Love it.
Kristi Angevine:
Right?
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. No, I totally agree. These little small things are the things that can be so critical and they’re so easy to overlook. It’s just like, you know, that stuff doesn’t really matter. It’s not that important. You know? Then I think what you said was also so powerful, the idea that it’s so easy to overlook the things that are going well.
I mean, that’s something that I do exquisitely well, and so do my clients, is just minimize or discount or overlook the things that are working really well and not basically capitalize on them in ways that, you know.
Maggie Reyes:
Yes. We want to capitalize on that, right? That’s what we want you to do all the time.
Maggie Reyes:
Okay. Tell us the next one.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So the other big one was, I don’t know where this came up, but I was probably telling you something about my response, probably under stress response, and how I was like trying to talk about things and I was probably talking about it in a way of like, “Oh, our communication between my spouse and I or my kids and I, it’s just really good. We talk about all this stuff.”
And you’re like, “Sometimes talking might not be the answer.” I remember thinking like, no, no, no, no, talking is the answer. Maggie’s just mistaken. She doesn’t quite understand. It took me a while to quite understand that more conversation and talking things out and maybe like harping on things, particularly at a time when my husband or my kids might not be interested in talking again about something, maybe wasn’t the only way to problem solve, brainstorm, or respond.
You recommended a book and it was great. Just so the idea that words and talking things out isn’t the only way was a huge take home.
Maggie Reyes:
That’s something that I’ve lived through in my own humanity and that I’ve Coached on it so much. When you’re highly verbal, as many women are, not all women, but many women, and definitely the people who listen to this podcast, right? You process through words. Then you think this is the best way. It’s kind of like if the issue hasn’t been resolved and you’ve already talked about it more than once, then throwing more talking at it isn’t going to solve it.
It’s kind of like when I used to work in HR they would throw more money at things and be like, “Well, we’ll budget for it and that’ll solve the problem.” I’ll think, “Well, if we don’t actually address the root cause of why this is happening, it doesn’t matter how much money we throw at it, we’re not actually solving the problem.”
So for anyone who has budgets or has to think about things like that in terms of teams and business things, it’s really the same idea. It’s like we don’t just throw the same thing at it over and over again, it’s like, what else is available to us here?
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. What is another way that we could get to the same place?
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kristi Angevine:
You know, without just doing the same thing.
Maggie Reyes:
Exactly. Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
So that kind of brings me to the next point.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
One of the things that I was doing a lot of, sort of like talking, was I didn’t even really realize, like I knew this was something I was experiencing, but I didn’t know how to solve for it, but I was basically reflexively feeling responsible or feeling at fault for other people feeling cranky or having a bad day or just anything. Things unrelated to me. Things related to me.
I see this in my clients all the time, who they were taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, I just didn’t realize that I was doing it so much. So one of the huge things that I learned, just not exactly sure if it was something explicit or just through all the consistent messaging that you gave all the time, was I just was able to basically stop reflexively taking ownership of other people’s emotional experiences.
Especially with my husband. I think it’s been so freeing for him too because I would explain this to him and be like, “Listen, when you are having this experience, this is what I’m thinking, this is what I’m feeling, and this is why I’m up and trying to force feed you some solutions when you don’t want to talk about it and you’re not looking for a solution.”
It was really great for us just to be able to talk about that and for me to be able to hear him be like, “Yeah, yeah. No, no, this is totally mine.” And for me to have that positive reinforcement that there can be a separation and that what’s in my lane is my lane and what’s in his lane can be in his lane and we can navigate that anyway.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. That’s so good. Yeah. We all go through that. I haven’t really figured out, I’m sure maybe we could interview a sociologist or something as to why that is. Because it is a phenomenon that millions of us have where we just take it on and make even things that are not personal. I’m thinking about this in terms of infrastructure things, too, where we take personal responsibility for something that’s an infrastructure problem.
I used to see it in HR all the time, too. I was like, let the work go undone. They’re never going to know there’s a problem in the department if you keep saving the department by killing yourself. Right? I used to have a conversations like that and people would be like, “Oh no, no. We can’t possibly let the project fail.” I’m like, “Why not?”
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah.
Maggie Reyes:
Right?
Kristi Angevine:
Totally.
Maggie Reyes:
Right. It’s like how will anyone know there’s an actual problem if you’re constantly overcompensating for a structural issue, which is this department is understaffed that you actually need one more person? Right?
So I cannot advocate for one more person if all the work is perfectly done and everything is in order and everything’s fine and everybody’s happy. Back then in my role at that time I was like, “How do I help you?” So if we take it now into marriage situations, it’s like we can’t even renegotiate if something isn’t working if we’re just overcompensating for it all the time.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. I love that this segues so nicely into that idea that the next thing that was really powerful for me was you talked a lot about creating a marriage culture.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I don’t think that language is one that I have maybe explicitly brought up with my spouse in terms of we are creating this, this is what we’re doing, but little bits here and there it has. I think just like you were talking about, like the infrastructure and the culture of a business, like how you can create something that maybe it’s like the house of cards where you everything’s going great, but really at its core there’s something wrong.
I think that idea that we can create our culture on purpose and we can have in that neither of us feeling reflexively responsible for the other person’s issue and at the same time being able to talk about that. I think that’s been something that even though I haven’t explicitly said, “Hey, listen, we’re going to sit down and have a dinner and talk about our marriage culture,” we basically have been creating that.
That’s one of the things I think so powerful about going through this with The Marriage MBA is that you have this very clear structure to talk about something on purpose for how you want things to be. For me, what that does is not only to it help my husband and I be really intentional about how we want to create our interactions, but I think it’s so special because it really helps us model something that we really want to model for our kids.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I mean, and I know we’re modeling things all the time and we have no idea what they’re picking up on because they’re their own little human brains, but knowing that on purpose we’re at least trying to model something that seems really precious and really special like this is what love can look like while you’re also having an experience of being annoyed. We can put these things together and we can do that as a marriage and we can do that as a family.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that so much. That’s so good. What’s the next one? Tell us.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So the next one, and I think this is the last one, it was I remember in the very beginning you talked about a lot of the concepts that are going to be the threads through the whole program, and one of them is that you asked us, “Would you be willing to, or what would it be like for you to, make your vision of the future stronger than your like memory of or your vision of the past?”
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I think that really resonated with so many people where people are like, “Wow. Oh, so I could really just decide what’s valuable to me, decide what I want to prioritize, decide how I want to feel and what I want things to be like going forward, taking with or not taking with anything from the present or the past, and could I work towards that?”
I just thought that was so beautiful, and I feel like that’s work that always keeps going, right? It’s not like you do it once. It’s like you’re always getting to do that, and that’s big. I just thought that ties everything together. Right?
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. Why was that so meaningful for you? What did that awaken in you?
Kristi Angevine:
I think what that awoken in me is, I mean, one of my passions is how we can proactively think about what we want to do, and by holding that as like a, not like a metric, but just a comparison to what we just naturally do it can give us this way to look towards, based on what I value, what do I actually want that maybe I’m just kind of forgetting about in my ordinary every day?
I’m just not really paying as much attention to that, and so if I can be deliberate about saying, hey, what I want for the future, which I know the future is just a construct, but what I would like is really valuable to me, then how can I bring that idea into the present moment?
I don’t know. I think the reason why it resonated so much is that I think it was so easy. For many, many years, I feel like I was in a bit of like, like many of us are, kind of a survival mode with work, with kiddos, and just getting through the near future and having some vague notions of what I wanted things to be like, but nothing that was really concrete.
Not like, oh, this bold thing I really want to go for. So that really just made it almost gave me permission to be like, no, no, no, this is not only something that you could do, it’s something that’s really valuable to keep in the forefront of your mind.
Maggie Reyes:
Yes. I love that so much. What kind of results did you create?
Kristi Angevine:
Oh my gosh. What kind of results did I create? I wish there could be like those reality TV shows where they just put a camera in and then somebody says, “And look what happened?”
Maggie Reyes:
Yes.
Kristi Angevine:
I wish somebody else could sort of like observe that, because I’ve been in it, and so when I thought about it for a little bit, I was like, man, what actual things did I create? But the things that I think are really key are we are both, my spouse and I, I think we are both better now about being more explicit about how we’re feeling in the moment.
So there’s something just about, I don’t know how this happened, but I realize this probably halfway through The Marriage MBA program, is that we would be talking and one of us would be experiencing either stress or overwhelm or being distracted by something else, and in the moment, I noticed with my spouse, he would say, “Hey, listen, just so you know, I am feeling a little bit stressed right now and I’m a little distracted thinking about such and such and I’m probably not listening as well. Or if I seem a little snippy, it’s because of this other thing.”
That in the moment narration I feel like was just such a great diffuser. It was like using a little humor, but it was just sort of like this is just what’s going on, just so you know. I feel like that was so great because I think in the past we would both pick up on that implicitly, like, “Oh, so and so seems a little distracted and snippy.”
But having it be so out in the open kind of just for me it helped me instead of trying to talk through things, be like, “Oh, you seem a little bit stressed. What should we talk about right now?” I was like, “Oh, this person, I can just embrace his humanity and he can be a little bit stressed and we can just keep on doing what we’re doing maybe without like me adding more fuel to the fire when maybe he’s preoccupied thinking about something and talking about something else right now isn’t really the most helpful thing.”
Maggie Reyes:
When you share in that way, you also don’t make up any stories about that. It’s you.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah.
Maggie Reyes:
If I’m preoccupied about XYZ thing that happened, you don’t have to spend any time at all looking for the 54 things you thought you did wrong.
Kristi Angevine:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely. Not that I ever take anything personally or out of context or exaggerate anything, right?
Maggie Reyes:
Right. Right. It’s okay. Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I mean, I think the other thing, I kind of already mentioned this, but I think the other result that was directly correlated to going through The Marriage MBA was just what we’re modeling for our kids and it’s our awareness of what we’re modeling for our kids.
So we know sort of philosophically that we are modeling things and we know that they’re watching us and we see them as our little mirrors, but I think doing it on purpose and deciding, okay, this is how we want to do this, has really informed our dinner table discussions.
Our kids are pretty young, but I think it’s been nice to be like, “Hey, this is what we were experiencing a little bit ago. I got a little frustrated and he got a little angry and we got this and those are what those feelings are like and it’s totally fine to have those.” Then once we talk about them, we hear where each other, and just almost like giving them the run by.
So they see us when we’re in the middle of our feelings and they see us talking about our feelings and then they see us together and I think that’s just so nice because it kind of normalizes like, oh, you can feel all these things in this container. Not like you can only feel these things, but gosh forbid, you can’t get angry and still love somebody. It just sort of makes it all normal and sort of expands the space of what’s okay.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that. Expands the space of what’s okay. This is how we change for the children. It’s so good. Okay, what is a fun memory you have from Coaching?
Kristi Angevine:
Oh my gosh. Well, I remember you have a bell. There’s lots of shimmying going on. I feel like one of the most fun things is just when all of us in the group would have no clue that by the end of the call either we’d be crying or laughing together because of something somebody else brought up that we never had any experience with, but somehow there were some key themes that we could all relate to.
I mean, probably one of the most powerful things from the group was the things that I didn’t expect to get out of the group based on hearing other women tell about their experiences. So that’s probably another takeaway, but I think that was truly just deeply fun, like such an exuberant feeling to like have, is to do that growing in community learning together the things you just didn’t even expect.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that so much. One of the things that I really focus on on this show and whenever we talk about Coaching is not sugar coating that sometimes Coaching can be confronting. It can be uncomfortable. We can have moments where we discover or something that just wasn’t delightful. Tell me a little bit about one of those times or how you handled it.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So first off, I love the phrase less than delightful, right? There’s just something sweet about that. It almost seems more palatable when you phrase it that way. So I love the way you phrase things. I feel like one of the things that was so powerful about this Coaching container is that the culture of this Coaching container that you’ve created feels very safe.
Nothing is off limits. Everybody experiences similar things. So I feel like, and I don’t want to speak for the other women in the group, but I feel like all of us felt very safe. So for me, when I sort of rubbed up against noticing things about myself that weren’t the most delightful, it didn’t feel too jarring.
It just felt sort of like, oh, and now here’s this thing, and it explains so much. For me, it was sort of just an awareness that I experienced with the group, and then also got to see mirrored back my husband where he was like, “Oh, I noticed these things.”
I felt like I was able to receive this, wow, I’ve got kind of a baseline that’s way more anxious than I realized and I’ve had some stress in my life that was way more immense than maybe I gave credit for and that wasn’t maybe a part of my self concept. So even though it wasn’t, I was like, “Huh, I thought that was other people.”
It felt safe to realize and it felt just like a, not like a coming home, but just like when you realize something and it makes so much sense and just gives you so much clarity. I was like, “This explains so much.” So it felt great.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that you use that phrase, coming home, because to me I think about integrating all the different parts of ourselves and I think that that is really one of the things we do in The Marriage MBA. It’s like you have your professional part and your mom part, if your mom, and your wife and partner part and your sexy part, and it’s like how do we integrate that with our tender-hearted part and our wounded part and our sad part, and can we bring all of us to the relationship?
I always think about bringing it here in this space where everybody wants you to win, where everybody’s on your team, or everybody’s on your side. You practice doing that in that space so then you can go and do it in your life and in your other relationships. So I love that coming home is such a beautiful way to say that.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. As you are talking about this, the thing that occurs to me that it just wasn’t on my mind before I got on this call with you, and I’ve heard other clients of your say this, but I think probably one of the biggest things that was really powerful for me with this was realizing that it’s really true that there’s nothing in the jurisdiction of my husband’s experience, nothing about him had to change at all, absolutely nothing, for my experience and for our experience to change.
I remember hearing other people say that and I was sort of like nodding. I was like, “Of course. It just takes one.” But to experience that really deeply? It really does just take one. That part feels like a coming home. Right?
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. That’s so amazing. So powerful. Okay. Let’s see. I’m looking at my notes here. Oh, yes. What did you enjoy about working with me as your Coach?
Kristi Angevine:
Oh my gosh. Okay, so-
Maggie Reyes:
I’m going to be shameless for a moment. I’m practicing teaching everyone to be shameless, so I will be shameless.
Kristi Angevine:
We can be unapologetic about this. How much time do you have? Do you have a couple years for me to tell you about this? I mean, so I think what is so cool about what you’ve created, people can see it already on the way you’ve been talking to me.
You can already hear. The way you approach this is bring everything. We bring all the parts. All the parts are morally neutral, and so we bring them and we look at them with love and care. I think that’s one of the things I love the most is that you were very much like let’s honor where you are now.
So let’s not try to scurry away from what’s going on and what’s here, let’s honor that. Let’s look at what’s going really well. The idea of we can embrace the messiness of our humanity. I feel like you said that a lot. You’re like, “Let’s embrace the messiness. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It’s not a problem to fix.”
When you do all that, plus you pair it with the idea of like tiny incremental changes, like little things, small wins that seem like small things that are actually big things, I think what that does is it just creates safety.
So I think that’s one of your superpowers is not even explicitly creating safety, but implicitly creating it just by all these other little facets that just in the way you talk and the way that you share little anecdotes and the way that you talk about how your marriage is and how your enthusiasm shows up and things that you’ve gone through.
I think from that container of safety, I think the thing that was most powerful is that once you sort of model for ourselves. I’ll meet you where you are so that you can meet yourself where you are, and when you can meet yourself where you are, then that’s when you can start questioning things you want to question.
Not in a mean way. You just question it and look at it with curiosity, and then you can bring in that whole future vision of like, oh, and so now where do we want to go? I think that was probably one of the best parts was just this whole very soft, nice, and at the same time, you weren’t afraid to give any tough love of like, “Listen, this is what I see. What do you think?” In ways that were just really refreshing and really lovely.
Maggie Reyes:
Well, thank you, Kristi.
Kristi Angevine:
Thank you. Oh my God. Right?
Maggie Reyes:
One of the things I like to do on the podcast is just demystify what happens in Coaching, right? What actually happens? Okay. You’re going to talk about things that will feel uncomfortable sometimes. They will be received with love and compassion at like, just like you said. Then we see where do we want to go from here?
One of the things about when you said, “I meet you where you are and we all meet each other where we are,” is when we’re able to do that for ourselves, we can also do it with our partners. Because how many problems and issues and marriages are just caused by I want my partner to be somewhere else as opposed to where they are emotionally, mentally, intellectually, where they are right now. When we can meet them where they are, it’s like half the problems are resolved. So then our only job is to meet ourselves where we are.
Kristi Angevine:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Your listeners can’t see me nodding vigorously. I’m like, yes, yes, totally.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Okay. Does something come to mind that felt hard? We may have already touched upon it. If we did, that’s fine. But does something come to mind where you were like, “That was kind of a tough moment, but it was useful?”
Kristi Angevine:
I mean, to be honest, I feel like so much of it, for me, I know this might sound just sort of flippant, but I really love getting new awareness. There’s just something so reassuring about learning more and understanding why I am feeling the way I’m feeling, why I am approaching this. I feel like that’s what this did. It was like the peeling back all the time of getting the awareness and I don’t know that it actually felt hard.
Maggie Reyes:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I think it was sort of like when you have a good exercise workout and it’s not the ones where things are hard and you are pushing through, but you’re just like, “That was just an amazing hike.” It was like that, you know? I think there’s the potential for there to be hard things, like where we face things in ourselves or in our marriage that are less palatable. Right?
But there was something about just the way things were it even the people we saw in our cohort who were experiencing things that collectively seemed hard, it seemed like the softest landing spot to practice those things. So I don’t think I thought I ran into things that were hard. I mean, they were just were good.
Maggie Reyes:
I like to think about it like this could be hard and we can do hard things and it can be easier than we think it is and both of those things are both true. What if it’s super hard and it’s okay because we can do hard things? What if it’s easier than we think it is? Which one of those will serve me in this moment with whatever’s in front of me right now?
So for everyone listening, I offer you that. You can pick from one of those. Is there anything else that comes to mind that you’d love to add before I ask you a question from The Questions for Couples Journal?
Kristi Angevine:
No, I just want to say thank you. I know you pick and form your groups very deliberately and it was just great to be a part of it. I feel like, of course, I’m sure everybody does, I feel like my cohort was the best. They’re amazing. Hello, shout out to all of them. Right? I feel like my husband and kids would be like, “Thank you so much. This is so great.” You know?
I think the only thing that comes to mind that we didn’t really mention is just I feel like one of the things that I think is very clear with the way you speak is that you help those of us who have a tendency to overcomplicate things. You help us clear away the clutter and just keep things simple and clear.
I think you did that really well because some of us who are drawn towards you do have a tendency to either be very cerebral, very verbal, very complicate things, and I think you have a great way of really listening and keeping things simple, and being able to practice that week in and week out was just amazing.
Maggie Reyes:
Thank you for that. I received that with so much love and gratitude. Every cohort is spectacular in its own way. One of the things I just want to say for everyone listening on the podcast is the reason this program is for application only is because I really am committed to also only helping people that I know feel confident that I can help.
That’s really important to me. I don’t want to have a program where you come in and at the end you don’t feel like Kristi feels, like I learned something new, it helped me move to a new place, I feel like I’m in a different place of my marriage now. So that whole application process is really based on that filter.
I have had situations where I’ve had someone apply where I’ve said, “You know what I think would better serve you right now would be this other modality. Or what better might serve you right now is some other resource or some other thing.” So I want to just make that clear that when I’m looking at that, I look at how the questions on the application are answered from the point of view of do I really feel like this is the best fit for them and for me.
So it’s not just, oh, for me to Coach them would be delightful, right? Because I love Coaching, so for me, Coaching anybody would be delightful. But it’s like I think it’s the best fit for them based on how they’ve articulated what’s going on for them, and I think it’s the best fit for me because I can do my best work with someone who’s a great match both ways. So I am really committed to that.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. I love how you explained all that.
Maggie Reyes:
Thank you so much. Okay. So The Questions for Couples Journal, I like to ask a question at the end and here is yours. Think of someone you know who is a really good listener. What makes them a good listener?
Kristi Angevine:
Okay. I have a few people that come to mind and I think about them being kind of like a composite.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
I think there are a few qualities and I think the first one that comes to mind is there is, I don’t want to overuse that phrase we talked about earlier, but that idea of coming home and a soft landing spot. There’s something about when I’m talking to one of these people that I feel like there’s nothing else in their world but me and what I’m saying and they haven’t gone three steps ahead or three steps back, they’re just there with me.
I feel they’re so present and in step with me and at the same time there’s something about out their willingness to, because I know they’re going to listen because they know they’re listening, there’s never a problem for them to say, “Hold on just a second, I’ve got to tell you something,” and jump in and tell me something that has occurred to them in the moment that is relevant to what we’re talking about and then pivot right back into where they are.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. I love that question because I think that’s a hard one to actually articulate. It’s like I feel like when you see somebody who’s a good listener you could write down some sort of like body language cues that they’ve got, but there’s like something like hard to put your finger on that’s a little bit nebulous about what actually makes them a good listener that I think poets can probably describe better than I can.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah.
Kristi Angevine:
But that’s what comes to mind for me.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that so much because obviously if you’re a Marriage Coach or if you’re into Marriage Coaching or anything like that, communication always comes up as an issue in relationships in how to improve it and how to make it better and how to think about it. It’s like, well, what makes a good listener in your opinion, right?
Everybody’s opinion could be slightly different, and then are you practicing that thing that you think makes a person a good listener, first, and then can we observe in your partner, do they have that quality or a piece of that quality themselves? How do we model that or how do we bring that to life?
I love what you said when you used the word present because I think that indistinguishable thing that we can’t quite put in a bottle is awareness and presence, right?
Kristi Angevine:
Yes.
Maggie Reyes:
The mindfulness of being in the present moment. It’s almost like we’re tethered to the present moment, but we still have all of our experiences and all of our things of being alive on earth together, and so you can bring in that one thing that came up and then go right back to the next thing.
Kristi Angevine:
Yes, absolutely.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. I love that.
Maggie Reyes:
So Kristi just launched a podcast, and we’re so excited about it. So before we wrap up, first, tell us a little bit the name of the podcast, what it’s about, and then let us know how people can follow you, where they can find you.
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah. So the podcast is short and sweet, it’s called Habits On Purpose.
Maggie Reyes:
Okay.
Kristi Angevine:
So Habits On Purpose, and it is a podcast, it’s for my favorite most lovely humans that I work with in the whole planet, high achieving women who want to understand why they think, feel, and do what they do and really want to basically design habits that give more than they take.
So we really kind of get into what are the root causes of some of those more hidden habits, as well as the explicit habits. What is it that keeps you pressing snooze or staying up with you late or scrolling on your phone, and as well as maybe second guessing and people pleasing and being sort of tied to perfectionism?
So I’m so excited about it because habits are just, I mean, we talked about habits so much in your Marriage MBA, like how do we have a habit in our marriage, and just going to dive into that even more deeply.
Maggie Reyes:
Love it. Habits On Purpose. Then how can people find you?
Kristi Angevine:
Yeah, so it’s going to be habitsonpurpose.com/podcast.
Maggie Reyes:
Love it. Habitsonpurpose.com/podcast. We will link to that in the show notes so you can definitely find it on our website as well.
Maggie Reyes:
Thank you, Kristi, for being here. Thank you for everything you shared. I am just so grateful for your presence. Thank you.
Kristi Angevine:
The sentiment is totally mutual. Thank you so much, Maggie.
Maggie Reyes:
Bye, everyone.