Hello, I am so excited to be back with you all doing a solo episode. I feel like it’s just you and me hanging out and we’re going to have this deep intimate conversation and today is going to be such a good one. I have been quietly working away, designing my very first group program and I’m going to tell you all about it today. And it feels a little bit like Christmas, not going to lie. You know, when you buy the perfect present for someone and then you have to wait months to give it to them sometimes for weeks, I kind of feel like that. And we’re also going to talk about the three principles that will help you solve any problem in your marriage. I talk about them a lot, you’re going to hear about them again. We’re going to talk about them from a different angle today, because once I discovered them, it just changed everything.
And we’re going to talk about why community is so important, probably now more than ever, how to think about all the ways that you invest in your own success and often under-invest in your most important relationships. We’re going to talk a little bit about the meaning of it investing, which is going to be fun, the money we spend on vacations and weddings and things like that is just wild. And we kind of want to pause and think about, are you investing in the quality of your future in the same way? And I’ll give you some questions, really specific questions to focus on and to ponder when it comes to that stuff like a little mini coaching exercise. So that will be a little bit later in the episode. But first I want to invite you to connect with me on Instagram. Ever since I closed my Facebook group, I’ve been spending more time over there and I would love to hear from you.
So you can find me at @TheMaggieReyes, which is kind of fun because Reyes is a little bit like Smith. There’s a lot of Reyes’ in this world. So I kind of get a kick out of being The Maggie Reyes. And I feel a little bit like that meme, like, sorry, not sorry for all the other Maggie Reyes’ out there. Like, I’m sorry, but not really that much. Okay, so my hubby says that I crack myself up and I really, really do. So come find me on Instagram, we’ll crack each other up and you can find me @TheMaggieReyes. And today is a day for big announcements, I actually have two of them. So here’s a surprise. We are changing our podcast day from Fridays, when it usually comes out, to Mondays. So you’re getting this episode now and we’re going to have another one up on Monday because my team is amazing and they don’t miss a beat.
So yay for Mondays. And you’re going to get my episodes from now on every Monday. So you can start the week making your marriage stronger if you like to listen to them on Fridays, keep listening on Fridays, but they’ll come out on Mondays. And I feel like with all the interview episodes we’ve had recently, I just want to give you all an update on what I’ve been up to behind the scenes. I have been loving those interview episodes. I am so grateful to everyone who has come on so many beautiful clients and friends, and I’ve gotten such great feedback. So there’ll be more interview episodes coming up. I handpick my guests, people that I really love and I feel are so important for you to hear from them. So I’m looking forward to bringing you more of those, but here today, it’s just you and me.
And here’s the update. So due to the lockdown for coronavirus, I really have been living my best life at home. And the hubby and I are huge sci-fi nerds, I mean, huge. Okay. And we are in the middle of what I’m calling an epic rewatch of a show that we loved when it aired for the first time it’s called Stargate Atlantis. If you like sci-fi and you haven’t seen Stargate Atlantis, watch Stargate Atlantis. I could not recommend this show more. The villains are a little creepy looking. So usually I like don’t like ugly villains that look monstrous, but I watched the show in spite of how ugly looking the villains are. And watching it now, it really stands the test of time. Like we’re on the edge of our seat it’s so funny. because we’ve literally seen every episode and I’m like, I wonder what happens. And it’s so fascinating to have that experience knowing intellectually that I have seen every episode and not knowing whatsoever what’s going to happen next, having no memory.
All I remember is the characters, how I love them, and that’s really about it. And you know, that Maya Angelou quote that says people will always remember how you made them feel. I kind of feel that way about Stargate Atlantis fascinatingly enough. The specific things that happen on the show aren’t as important as all the feelings that the show inspires. So imagine that being true for your marriage. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing chores or something fancy, what matters is the feeling and the energy you attach to whatever activity you’re doing. I think that is something so important to remember as so many things that we’re used to doing before are either limited or we just don’t have access to them, or we have to figure out how to do them differently in this age of coronavirus that we’re living in. Just imagine that the activity itself doesn’t matter as much as the love you pour into it, just let that sink in.
I just thought that was so powerful to think about. So as we’re watching Atlantis, I’m also having many, many beautiful memories come up and I really invite you to be a person that whenever you have the opportunity to do something with someone you love, you take it. One of the things that has really given me so much comfort in this season of sort of nesting and staying home is knowing that I never said no to adventure. If there was an adventure calling in my heart, I did it. And if there’s an venture calling your heart right now, I really think about what is the safest and most prudent way to say yes to it. And just think about that. So before Atlantis went off the air, here’s the adventure that we had. My husband and I went to Vancouver where it was filmed. And we went to one of the very last conventions where you could get a tour of the set.
And now when we watch, it’s sort of like this freakish delight that we have when we’re watching, because we have stood in the star gate, in the gate room, we have been onboard the space ship that they called the Daedalus. So if you watch the show, you see the Daedalus we’ve been on the bridge at the Daedalus. The hubster literally sat in the captain’s chair. And I remember sitting in the navigator’s chair and I was so excited and you know, I love to plot the course wherever we’re going. So the navigator is chair was perfect for me. We got to meet several of the actors and I love Amanda Tapping. She’s one of the actresses on the show, one of the leads there, and we got to meet her and take a picture with her and just chat with her a little bit.
And I remember her just being so charming and delightful and telling us how cute we are. And you know, she’s like, you guys are adorable, which of course we totally are, but it really fills me with delight to know that she thinks so too. And now to sort of watch her on the show, having had that experience, it just brings back all those happy memories as well. So if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, either Stargate Atlantis or pull out some pictures, a picture book, a scrapbook, electronic pictures, something that you did before, like bring that happy memory to the present and enjoy it all over again. It’s sort of my hack whenever I want to feel, I don’t know, inspired or better about something. It’s like, Oh, let’s relive that, that was amazing. This live that in the present moment.
So we’ve been having a lot of fun with that. And I had recently the immense honor of being a guest teacher in a program that’s for coaches called Coaching Masters. It’s taught by my friend and brilliant colleague, Lindsay Dotzlaf. I know a lot of coaches listen to this show and if you’re a coach and you aren’t familiar with her work, I will put a link to her site on the show notes. So you can check her out. Her program is for coaches who want to master the art of coaching at the deepest level. And it was such an honor to spend some time teaching her students. I always tell Lindsay that I wish her program existed when I got my first coaching certification. It is exactly what I would have wanted then. And I mentioned the first coaching certification because the other big project I’ve been working on is submitting all of my graduation requirements for my second coaching certification.
And my original training was through The Life Coach School, which I adore. I mention it often on the show. I love using our tools and sharing all about it. And it’s really like the Yale of coaching schools. And the one I’m wrapping up now is with The Tantric Institute for Integrated Sexuality. It’s a 600 hour highly rigorous training and mixes neuroscience with modern somatic psychology, and ancient tantric principles. And I like to think of that one as the Stanford of coaching schools. And it’s been really great to have time at home, to wrap up all my coursework for that, get that submitted. So I’ve been working away on that. That is my update. How have you all been visit me on Instagram and tell me all the things I want to hear from you all. Okay. That was the appetizer. We are ready for the main course now.
So let’s dive in. We all know that regular school does not actually prepare us for real life. If it did, this is my hypothesis. We would learn how to balance checkbooks. We would learn about compound interest and credit scores. We were doing really practical things like how to cook 10 meals or talk about sex without freaking out. I think we would learn how to say no. And I know that all the time that I spent in geometry class, which is probably one of the worst classes, I was really bad at geometry. It would have been so much better served learning things like how to ask for a raise or even parallel park, right? So what do all of us do? We go out into the world and we figure all that stuff out the hard way. And when my hubby and I were dating. And then later when we got engaged, we met in our thirties and we got serious pretty quickly.
And one thing that we knew was we did not want to mess up our relationship. We went to workshops, we did retreats. We read books together. We did a bunch of things to really start off on the right foot, but we really kind of had to DIY, you know, we sort of just guessed then all worked out as you all know now. And one of the reasons I’m so excited about creating and launching my first group program is because I was able to finally put together the program I wish existed when I got engaged. So I’m taking everything I have learned from being in my own sort of personal marriage lab for the last 13 years, plus writing and researching over 150 articles back when I had a blog and all the episodes of this podcast and coaching dozens of clients in depth. So I’m so many relationship issues and then curating and condensing it all to the things that you absolutely need to know to make your marriage stronger and happier and more fun.
And as you know, from episode one, The Relationship Table, if you haven’t listened to that, I highly recommend it as well. There are three principles that will help you any problem in your marriage. And once you master them, you can apply them to any relationship in your life. And they are perspective, partnership and pleasure. You need all three to thrive, but of those three, perspective, which is really how you think about your marriage, the mindset that you bring to it, is really the most important one because it’s what allows you to create and cultivate the other two. Think about it this way. Every breakthrough you have in your marriage is always going to come back to a mindset breakthrough. You think about it differently first, then you feel differently about the same situation. You take a different action, which then creates a different result. Now, no one teaches this in school.
I feel like we’re all sort of floating in the ocean without a compass. And then we get ourselves into these really messy relationship situations. And the moment someone would just give us a compass, we would know exactly what to do, but without knowing where our North Star is, sometimes we just keep going around in circles. You ever feel that way? I for sure have done that. So I basically created The Marriage Mindset Breakthrough Activator, that’s the name of the program, The Marriage Mindset, Breakthrough Activator. I’ll tell you the story about the name of another time. To help you always have a compass and I’m going to give you some more details, but to sum it up, basically I would sum it up like that. You want a compass? Join the program, you’ll be able to navigate in any waters. Now, those of you like me who love the details, I am that person who reads the credits when we watch shows, I’m like, oh, this person wrote this show I really like another writer wrote this show I really like.
So if you’re like me and you love the details, here are some of the basics. It’s a six month intimate group program where we will have weekly teaching and coaching calls. And we’re going to be both deep and goofy because that’s how I roll. We will do hard things and we will have fun. We will have a private Facebook group and we will celebrate wins. We’ll manage challenges. We’ll create communities. You have a group of likeminded women, all focused on creating five star marriages together that you can confide in as you implement everything that you’re learning. And I’m going to teach you how to self coach, so that you have the mindset, strength of a five star wife. And we’re going to talk about the prism of pleasure from flirting to sexy times so you can always be cultivating pleasure and fun for yourself in your marriage.
And one of the things I see when people come to me and they’re struggling is I actually ask them questions to see how much fun are they having together. And tell me a little bit about what their pleasure is like. And there’s always a pleasure deficit when I see a relationship that’s struggling. We’re going to make sure that we talk about how not to have a pleasure deficit. And the number one thing that I get asked for help with the most is how to communicate better. And we are not only going to cover that, but we’re also going to talk about how, and when not to communicate at all. It’s really sort of like an art and a science. Sometimes I need to communicate better, here’s what I need to do.
Sometimes I need to just stop talking. We’ll talk about that. So we are for sure, going to take some of your favorite podcast episodes as well. We’re going to bring those concepts to life. We’re going to apply them directly to your situation. And you know, I’m going to have some exclusive tools that I’ve developed in my private coaching practice that I have not taught anywhere else that my students in this program are going to love. So heads up just like the podcast I like to keep my tools simple and doable and highly effective. I like to think of them like lasers. So we don’t spend a lot of time on theory. We spend most of our time on application. And like I said, it will really be like having a compass and just always knowing where your North Star is so you know exactly how to navigate any situation.
And one of the things I’m really excited about is really having an intimate community of like minded women to share the experience of really showing up in your marriage differently with, I think that is so, so important. About three years ago, I want to say I went to a training in New York with a very world renowned psychologist named Esther Perel. If you’re not familiar with her, she’s amazing. And she was teaching a workshop for therapists and coaches on how to help our clients overcome infidelity. And it was a super powerful training. It’s one of my favorite trainings that I’ve done. And one of the many things that stood out for me was when she shared how often she would ask her clients, who else are you talking about this with besides me? And how many of her clients would say no one? And I have seen this in my private coaching practice as well, where one of the coaching homework assignments that might come up is very simply, go make a friend.
And we literally strategize where and how to approach making a friend in a variety of circumstances. And I’m in a group program myself with my business coach, where I’m surrounded by likeminded women who are focusing on building coaching businesses with integrity and love. And we share all the challenges and failures and the successes and the ups and the downs. And it’s something that I find so comforting and so useful. And oftentimes one of my colleagues will share something that’s exactly the most perfect thing to help me with whatever’s on my mind and my heart at that moment that I might’ve not thought of on my own, but because we’re in a group talking about these things, it’s the most perfect thing that helps me so much. I have found it massively useful and I love being able to create a similar space for women focused on thriving in their lives and their marriages, and for all of us to share this common experience together and support each other along the way. Especially in this time of lockdown and isolation, I am really looking forward to the support and the love that we’re going to create together over a six month period.
So I have cleared time on my calendar to do the applications via an enrollment consultation. So we will get a chance to talk together and really ensure that it’s a perfect fit to help you create the marriage you want. You can get even more details and the link to apply and book your consultation at maggiereys.com/group. So you can go to the show notes for this episode, or you just go straight to maggiereyes.com/group, all the details will be there. And the last thing I want to talk about as we wrap up today is really to invite you to think about how you invest in your marriage. When we think about relationships, we usually think about feelings and we don’t usually think about investments. And when I talk about investing, I don’t just mean money. I mean, time, energy, focus priority. So many times when I talk with women who are struggling in their marriages, I will ask about things like how often do they spend unstructured time together without kids or other family members just to enjoy each other’s company.
And so often I get answers like I’m so exhausted at the end of the day, I am too tired to do whatever it is. And then for the too tired, after that, you can just put everything a couple needs to do to stay strong, right? I’m too tired to talk or shared dreams or plan adventures or connect physically or emotionally or mentally you name it. You can insert anything you want after “I’m too tired” I’ve probably heard it at some point. And so many really, really smart, brilliant women do not realize that their day doesn’t just happen to them, they get to decide what they prioritize and what they invest in. And when we work together, one of the simplest tweaks we make is just to really think about priorities and investments. So, I really want to challenge you to think about that too.
I was preparing my notes for this episode and I decided to look up the cost, the average cost of a wedding in a major metro area in the U S. And I know we have listeners all over the world, I love all of you, thank you for being here. Here’s the info for the U S you can look it up on your own country, it might be an interesting thing to look up. In the United States, we really prioritize weddings. And somewhere between $26,000 to $38,000 is the average cost in a major metro area to major city for a wedding. The average cost for a divorce can vary very wildly, depending on the assets. The most recent stat that I saw was about $15,000 per person. So in the U S as a society, we spend anywhere between $25,000 to $30,000 up to multiple six figures at the beginning of a marriage or at the end of a marriage.
But very rarely do we think about actively investing in our marriage in the middle. And the middle is the most important part. We will invest in home upgrades and vacations and things like that, and not blink an eye, but often when someone thinks about really investing in their relationship, it takes a minute, right? Because as a society, we’re not used to talking about it. So that’s one of the things I always want to do on this show is talk about the things we should be talking about that are important. That really matter that we aren’t talking about. And I think this is one of them. As you probably know, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, I live in Miami. So where I live, people spend a lot of money on their pools, getting pools installed the maintenance of the pool, fixing the pool, all the pool things, right?
And I love a good pool so there’s nothing against pools here, but I just want to give your brain a place to land. So think about this. The average national cost of a pool in the United States is somewhere between $20,000 to $50,000. And if you called a friend and said, hey, I’m getting a new pool, it would probably be something you mentioned in passing and you move on. But imagine calling your friend and saying, hey, I’m investing in a life coach, or I’m doing a match program. There would probably be like a thousand questions, most likely. So I really want to open a conversation in our world, the world that I live and lead in to just think about how we invest and what we invest in. And I love words, I’m a word nerd. So I looked up and Merriam Webster dictionary, the word invest, and it is defined in some really interesting ways.
So the first one is to commit in order to earn a financial return. And it’s so interesting because money is part of the definition. It’s says to commit in parentheses money, but what’s important isn’t the money, it’s the commitment. And sometimes that commitment comes in the form of money. The second definition is to make use of, for future benefits or advantages. Like when you invest your time wisely, that was the example they had in the dictionary. And for sure, when you listen to this podcast, you’re making an investment in your future. You’re investing your time to help you create a powerful and important result, right? So you’re investing to create a future benefit, right? The last definition of invest really surprised me, actually, it says to involve or engage, especially emotionally. And the example they gave is when someone is deeply invested in their children’s lives.
So, even I was researching and I was like, oh, when someone’s deeply invested in something, that means it really matters to them. Right? Now I think almost all of us have that friend or a family member who is heavily invested in being negative or looking for what’s wrong in every situation. Or we know that person who, my client, Melissa, she was on the show for Releasing The Need To Be Right, I’ll put the link in the show notes. And she calls herself a control enthusiast. I think she calls herself a reformed control enthusiast, but we all know that person who is very invested in being right and sometimes so invested in being right. They’d rather be right than be in powerful, loving, deep connection with another human. So here are three questions to ask yourself this week about how you invest in yourself, what are you invested in your values and priorities and your marriage.
And I’m really invested in having conversations we don’t normally have, right? That’s really important to me. I’m super invested in doing marriage differently and teaching all of you, how to do marriage differently and how to create the marriages we want to have. Right? So here are the three questions. Number one, what am I most invested in right now? To answer that question, look at your daily schedule, look at your checkbook or your credit card receipts. When you look at how you spend your time and your money, you will find what you are most invested in, it will give you so much clarity. How you spend your days, how you spend your money will always reveal what your biggest investments are. Now, the second question is, why am I invested in these things? Is that a habit? Is it to meet someone else’s expectations? Is it genuine love and desire?
Is it obligation? Just check in. Just check in to see is everything that you’re investing in right now, a true match for your values and for what matters most to you. If it doesn’t and you can make tweaks. And if it does, you can just celebrate yourself. You’re already living a five star life. Rock on and keep going, keep doing what you’re doing. That intentionality right, is what five star, when you’re talking about a five star marriage or a five star life, that’s what it’s all about. Okay. So the first two questions, what am I most invested in right now? Why am I invested in these things? The third question is, do I love my reasons? Now, Brooke Castillo, who is the founder of The Life Coach School, where I did my original certifications I mentioned earlier, she really taught me to always check my reasons.
And I love that I do that all the time now. So often we don’t check in with our reasons. And it’s important to do that from time to time. When I was writing up my notes for this episode, I remembered there was something I was super focused on early this year, that when I checked in with my reasons, I realized they weren’t really very solid and I immediately knew how and where to tweak and get back on track with what really matters to me. So sometimes you can do something out of duty and obligation, but when you really look more closely, it doesn’t match with your priorities. Or you can decide that you have a sense of duty, but that sense of duty is really a form of love. So there are things where we initially might think of as, Oh, it’s my duty, but we’re really lovingly choosing that duty and it feels expansive and delicious and wonderful.
But other times we can think, Oh, it’s my duty, but it really feels oppressive. And the only difference is really how you feel about it. So that’s one way to check in with that. So the three questions, what am I most invested in right now? Why am I investing in these things? Do I love my reasons there? Ther you have it. The Marriage Mindset Breakthrough Activator program is opening its doors and I’m so excited to chat with you. If that feels like a great fit for you, of course, I’m going to call it Marriage MBA for short and have so much fun with that. My husband is very amused as always. And I will be back next week to help you make your marriage stronger, see you then.