Hello superstars. I am so fired up today and we’re going to talk about individual marriage life coaching. There’s someone right now who needs to make a big decision about their marriage, who needs to decide what is next for them and needs to take action and I am sharing this episode today for you so you know exactly what you need to know to decide if my coaching program is right for you and I’m going to give you the behind the scenes on how I determine if a client is a good fit to get the best results from Marriage Life Coaching with me. Now, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while and thinking, this woman just gets me, I hereby challenge you to take the next step and apply for coaching with me. That’s what life coaches do. We challenge you. It is the deepest, most powerful experience you can have to spend an hour every week focusing on your most important relationship and making it stronger.
There’s literally no better use of your time. You can go to Maggiereyes.com/coaching and hit the big blue “apply now” button to apply and to inspire you to go apply for private coaching with me right now, I want to share a very special client celebration. It’s more like a client experience from my client, Kristen, who is a forensic scientist in California and as I read this to you as I share her words with you, I really invite you to think about where you are right now and your marriage. Is your situation similar to Kristen’s? If you keep going, how you’re going now, is that going to give you the best outcome or do you want help to get clear and create a win at wifing being an awesome five star wife? Now, athletes hire coaches to win games and executives and business owners hire coaches to win revenue and create more success.
When my clients hire me, they hire me to win at marriage, not to win over their husbands, but to win and making their marriage amazing as a team. Now, I love Kristen’s example because that’s exactly what she did. Here’s her experience. It’s super, super detailed because remember, she is a forensic scientist. She’s all about evidence. So as you listen to the details look out for one thing that’s going to help you today. Right now, whether we ever worked together or not. One of my highest intentions for this podcast is for every episode to have a golden nugget in it that you can take, listen to, pass through your own discernment, and think about how will you apply this today in your relationship to make your relationship better. And in Kristen’s experience as she’s sharing, there’s a lot of little tweaks that we made. I’m always talking about how coaching we make small tweaks for the big impact.
So you’ll hear several little tweaks that we made. So pick your tweak as you’re listening. Here’s Kristen’s experience. In her words. Less than two years into our marriage, my husband and I reached a point where we were both unhappy and felt ourselves arguing every day. I knew we needed to change our course, but I had no idea how to make the necessary improvements. I started searching the internet for ideas and resources and I discovered Maggie’s website. I then became a member of her Facebook group, The Better Marriage Club. One day, Maggie wrote a post in the group about how you cannot unburn a pie. Her words resonated with me. I felt like the temperature and my marriage was up way too high and I was afraid we would quickly burn our marriage beyond repair. That day, I scheduled my first phone call with Maggie to seek coaching to help improve my marriage.
I was still nervous for that first phone call, but Maggie put me at ease and gave me confidence that life coaching would help me make improvements in my life and in my marriage. Working with Maggie was truly a pleasure. Every time we spoke, I felt like I was talking to a dear friend who only wanted the best for me. I was always impressed by things Maggie would bring up from previous conversations. Her impeccable memory made me feel heard and it was a great way for her to develop specifically how she coached me. I absolutely felt that Maggie tailored her coaching to me, my strengths and my learning style, which made each lesson easier for me to grasp. I started working with Maggie because I wanted to save my marriage. Maggie helped me grow as a person and bring that growth into my marriage. We would often spend our coaching sessions discussing an argument with my husband that I had that week or recurring issues that we face.
I liked that Maggie would coach me to resolve the problem or approach it in a new way, and she also coaches in a way that the lesson can be applied to a number of other scenarios. I think of Maggie, a lot, when we first started working together, I had reached a point in my marriage that was full of despair and it really relied on her supporting guidance. As time went on, my marriage improved because I was practicing what I was learning from Maggie. I also realized that she was coaching me to become independent so that I didn’t need to lean on her. I would be able to coach myself through future problems. It’s been a few months since our last coaching session, but I hear her voice in my head often as I take new approaches in my marriage. One of my favorite lessons I learned from Maggie was the power of setting an intention.
This is a tool I have shared with my husband and it has provided us with a new opportunity for communication to set intentions for our marriage and different events that we’re anticipating. I’ve also worked on my own to set intentions for myself in preparation for the birth of our first child. I set intentions for the labor and the delivery. The mental preparation of these intentions enabled me to have an amazing birthing experience because that’s what I wanted to have. I’m so thankful to Maggie for teaching me this skill that will help me throughout my lifetime. As an added bonus, Maggie helped me breathe some new life into my career. I love my job, but I was starting to lose some of my daily drive and motivation. Maggie was teaching me about stress cycles in my marriage and life. She knew about my passion for my work, so she used that as an example to teach this concept.
We devised a plan of something I could do for five minutes to leave the stress behind at the end of each Workday. This small tweak gave me new energy at work. I started to be more excited about what I was working on and found that my productivity increased. I was thrilled to regain that energy and excitement from my work all as a result of 10 minutes during our regular coaching session while I was working on my marriage. Thank you, Kristin for being so detailed. That was amazing and I just know that that description was super helpful for so many people to really get a vision of where you can be when you start out in a coaching journey and where you can be when you end in a coaching journey. I’ts so fun for me to share those celebrations with all of you and I had this moment as I was preparing my notes for this episode, thinking, can you imagine me sharing your client’s celebration on an upcoming episode?
Like would that be fun? Can you imagine what you would say? How would you describe where the changes that you made, how you’re feeling, what’s happening? Just think about what you would want to have achieved six months from now. Step into that vision for just a moment and imagine your marriage stronger and happier and more delightful, even in the middle of a lockdown, even dealing with all of the things happening in the world right now. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Here are three things that you need for Marriage Life Coaching to help you make your relationship better. You need to trust in yourself. You need to trust in the process and you need to trust in me as the person helping you as your guide, and I shared so many of the things that I teach my private clients on the podcast. So the process and how I approach helping you is super transparent and super clear.
The themes you hear me talk about here are exactly the same themes that we will tackle together and personalize for you when we work together in coaching one-on-one, so those two things are really covered. What you really need then is just trust in yourself that you will do your best to try new things. Here’s what I want you to know. This is super important. You do not need to trust that you will never fall down or never make a mistake or never mess up. Change is messy, even good change. So you will absolutely for sure make mistakes. The only thing you need to trust is that you have the ability to get back up again. I’m gonna repeat that because it’s so important. The only thing you need to trust is that you have the ability to get back up again. As long as you can fall down and get back up again and course correct when a mistake happens, then coaching can absolutely help you. I can help you. So if you have been thinking about and waiting and thinking some more, here is your invitation to stop thinking and just apply.
I promise to tell you if I really think it can help you or to recommend other resources that aren’t the absolute best fit to work together. If you listen to my podcast regularly, you know my client celebrations are off the hook. My clients get amazing results. One of the reasons that happens is I am highly selective. I only work with clients that I know I can help. This is good for you and for me. I love those everybody wins situations. So that is how I set up my application process. If we’re a great fit to work together, we rock it out and here’s how you know if you’re a great fit, if you love the podcast and my approach to marriage and your heart feels happy and like this totally makes sense when I share the concepts I teach, then you know my coaching style is perfect for you.
Here is how I know if you’re a great fit. This is the question that I ask. What is your willingness to be uncomfortable in the service of making your marriage better and not just better, but taking it to a place where it can thrive? Having a coach is absolutely awesome. And since I got into coaching, I’ve always had some kind of coach supporting me as I’ve worked through different goals and desires of my life. And having a coach gives you a thought partner to think things through with and someone who is a compassionate, loving observer but isn’t emotionally attached to any of the situations of your life or any of the scenarios that you find yourself in. So they can speak clearly, no matter how rainy or cloudy your situation looks like to you when you’re in it. Sometimes it feels amazing to be celebrated and seen by another human.
And that is a beautiful part of coaching. And all of those things are true. And this is also true. Being coached can also be an uncomfortable, it’s like having a baby. You are so delighted and so excited to have a baby, but the actual giving birth part is not particularly delightful. So when you are giving birth to a new chapter in your marriage, the actual next chapter is awesome and amazing, but the giving birth part isn’t, it can feel hard. So we all know that staying in a marriage that isn’t working is even harder. It’s so much better to do everything you can to make it work and then you either rise up in the marriage or you rise out, out of it. When Rick coaching one on one doing some of the homework will be uncomfortable. The time investment, the money investment, the questions I ask, the answers you give, all of it is really meant to shake you up to break the inertia happening in your life right now and take you in a new direction.
If you listened to the episode on how to argue better with Simone, you will hear her say how she absolutely resisted some of the coaching guidance that I gave her, but she tried it anyway and in love that she shared that she was so real on that episode. If you’re ready to walk through your resistance so that your marriage can thrive, that’s what we both know, we are going to rock it out together. Now, here are some commonly asked questions that come up often, and I thought it would be really useful to share them with you, especially if you’re considering hiring me as your coach participating in my coaching program and really diving in to making your marriage the best it could possibly be. What exactly is individual marriage coaching? I work with one person and their relationship to transform it. How does that work?
My approach is grounded in systems theory and psychology, which the very most basic description of that is that when one element of a system changes, the other elements in the system react to that change. So in this case, the wife changes, the husband responds, the marriage improves, that’s as simple as I could possibly make it. Now, I usually work with women married to men. The same psychological process applies to same sex couples too. That really does not make a difference. I go into a lot of detail in the Better Marriage Masterclass. There’s a section called The Power of One and we’ll link in the show notes to that podcast episode so you can get a fully, fully detailed example there. But basically let’s say that you complain every day and you stopped doing that and you start thinking your partner instead, suddenly your partner feels appreciated instead of attacked.
Suddenly you argue less. You might even laugh or start having fun and those are the various minor tweaks that we focus on that have a big impact and I love that Kristen shared some of hers that you could really see how that works in practice. Now why do I work with clients in six month coaching cycles? People ask me about that too. Part of our work is teaching and learning your relationship skills and I support my clients through learning to go from what I call crawling to walking to running emotionally. It’s like learning how to walk at an emotional level in a new way. And imagine when you learn how to walk physically, there are times that you fall down, you get back up again, there will be victories, there will be falls and you will learn from both. So in a six month cycle, it gives us enough time together for you to learn new skills, practice them, fall down and get back up again.
Be supported, figure it out in that container that we’re coaching in. So sometimes we’re done in one six month cycle and we actually turn a relationship around. Sometimes there’s more work to do and that’s really individualized depending on what’s happening in your life and your marriage and what your goals and dreams and desires really are. Now, who gets the best results from working with me? Most of my clients are leaders. They are type a women who know exactly how to succeed at life and how to succeed at work. Well, when it comes to marriage, there’s just something about it that feels challenging. The same rules don’t apply and they need to alter their approach and that’s where I help them really make some tweaks to be as happy and as thriving at home as they are in their careers and their businesses. And my clients who are action takers and really commit to trying new ways of thinking and to trying new approaches to problems that they’ve had in the past, they’re really the ones that got the best results.
Now, another question that comes up is what is the difference between coaching and therapy? And I always think of coaching therapy, like cousins, they’re from the same family but they have some differences. And I’m going to do a whole separate episode on this cause I think it’s so useful to understand, but for today I’m going to use a baseball game as an example. So there’s so many nuances involved and baseball is the only sport that I actually understand because many years ago I dated a guy who was into baseball and that’s how I learned it. So during the baseball game, if a baseball player breaks a leg, they call in the team doctor, the team doctor will help the player get healed enough to play the game. The baseball coach helps the player win the game.
And I’ve coaching, we focus on solutions and moving forward. And if there’s trauma uncovered during the coaching process, then the coach, which in this case would be me, might be investigating different kinds of therapy as coaching homework, if there’s quote unquote an emotional broken leg to be dealt with. So then the client can be well enough to go back to working on winning at the game of marriage. Oftentimes coaching and therapy can compliment each other really, really beautifully. Just like baseball coaches and team doctors work together to keep the team healthy and focused to play at their best and to win more games. So I hope that example was useful. There’s a lot of overlap between coaching and therapy, but there are also differences and I just love using that idea of imagining a playing field and imagining the team doctor helps you be well enough to play and then the coach helps you be brilliant enough to win.
I just think that’s so clear. I hope you think it’s clear too, okay. What types of coaching clients do I work with? I really work primarily with two types of clients. One wants to make their marriage work and doesn’t know how and really wants to make their marriage work and is totally committed. All in, has a husband that they love, some annoyances or some arguments that are going on. They just need some tweaks in order to make it work. The second type of client I work with needs to decide whether to stay or go. They aren’t clear on what to base that decision on. And so they haven’t decided anything. And so what I like to explain is first we clean up your side of the table, how you’re thinking and feeling and showing up in the relationship. And once we do that, a couple of things happen.
Either the relationship improves to the degree that it’s clear that you want to stay or you realize you really did give it your all and you decided to go. But you make that decision from a place of really grounded, centered love instead of from a place of disappointment and anger, which really helps the relationship moving forward no matter what format it takes and becomes even more important if there are children involved. So those are the two types of clients that I work with most often. Occasionally I’ll have someone who follows me, loves my work, and wants my help with some other big dream or big goal that they have. And I will be delighted to talk to you if that’s you. And to see if I can help you with whatever’s in your heart and in your mind. So there you have it. Individual marriage coaching explained. Okay, someone needed to hear that today. And so if that was you, you special someone, this episode was for you. Next week we’re going to talk about the daily check-in and why it matters, and I’m so excited to share that with you. So look out for that episode. And remember, you need three things to have a thriving, five-star marriage: perspective, partnership, and pleasure, and they are all in your control.