Focus On This Podcast

75. How to Set Real-Life #RelationshipGoals

Audio

Overview

The people you love matter more than anything else. But it’s easy to overlook setting relational goals, and hard to know where to start. You don’t want your relationships to drift aimlessly. But what should you do?

We’ve got a few ideas. This practical, feel-good episode brings together new and old voices for a brainstorming session for the ages. We’ll walk through four categories to consider as you create relational goals—dropping in examples, stories, and encouragement that will inspire you to get creative about how you invest in the people you love most.

In this episode, you’ll discover—

  • How to make time together more meaningful
  • Resources for improving your understanding of connection
  • Small habits with big relational impact
  • Why a new adventure might be exactly what your relationship needs
  • What a “bike party” is—and why you should care

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Episode Transcript

Verbs: Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the Internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs, here with Nick Jaworski and Neal Samudre.

Nick: What?

Neal: What? Where are Courtney and Blake?

Nick: What is happening, Verbs? Everyone is panicking. They’ve probably turned the podcast off already.

Neal: We’re taking over.

Nick: Really, what I think of is more of… This is Nick at Nite. Sort of an 80s reference. On Bewitched they replaced the husband, Dick York with Dick Sargent, I believe. There’s a reference for you. But we’re not replacing anybody, just to be clear. They’re irreplaceable. The producer in me says… I feel like I should state that no one is being replaced. It’s a busy, crazy world. We’re filling in. We’re getting to share different members of the Michael Hyatt team. We’re very excited to have Neal here. Neal, what do you do? What’s your story? How did you end up here?

Neal: I ask myself that every day. “What do I do?” I am the director of marketing at Michael Hyatt & Company for the Michael Hyatt & Company brands, which means everything that’s not Full Focus I direct the marketing for, which is the short summary. Other than that, living here in Nashville, Tennessee, with my wife and my dog, and we have a baby on the way. That’s fun news.

Nick: Congratulations. I didn’t know that. This is very exciting.

Neal: Courtney is going to come back from maternity leave and I’m going to switch out with her. She’s going to be my replacement.

Nick: There you go. I like the confidence.

Verbs: Way to bring it back around. I love it. So, gentlemen, today we’re having this conversation centered around relationships. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you this question. Have you ever wanted to write a relational goal but not felt sure on where to start with that goal? Like, you just didn’t know where to begin.

Neal: Yeah. I don’t have goals for my relationships because my relationships are perfect and they never need any work.

Nick: That’s the end of the episode. Goodbye, everybody.

Verbs: Thanks for joining us on this episode.

Neal: I’m just playing, of course. At Michael Hyatt & Company we have this tool called the LifeScore Assessment. I take that every year to assess my life and figure out where I need to set goals. There are some times where I’m lacking in the relationship category, and I’m like, “How do I fix this? How do I improve my score?” It’s hard to wrap your mind around that.

I think it’s so easy to come up with goals for work and money and all that sort of stuff, because this is stuff that’s fed to us externally. We might have a big promotion on the line at work or we might want to hit a financial milestone. It’s easy to create goals in those areas, but with relationships, it takes a great deal of awareness to notice that you need to improve your relationship, and it takes a great deal of knowledge and insight to know what to do. So, yeah, it’s tough.

Nick: Yeah, I don’t think I really considered it until I started working with the Full Focus Planner. Before I was using the planner, I spent like a year and a half once a month in a room with Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller. Think about my access to these people you know, and I was still kind of going, “This isn’t for me.” I was a hard sale because of my own limiting beliefs about what I could accomplish or what I could do.

I don’t think if the system hadn’t highlighted the value… There are spots in your planner (if you’re not using a planner, you can just remember this) about relationship goals. I don’t know that I would have considered it, and it is really helpful to be able to focus on something that… Of course, your relationships, all kinds of them…your spouse, partner, children, coworkers, neighbors, extended family…

All of that is so important, but because these other people don’t demand of you as much… I mean, if you have a baby they do, but because it’s so easy because they want to give you grace, they want to give you room, they don’t have the same demands on you as your boss at work or whoever. So it’s sometimes hard to recognize you need the plan, but if you didn’t know, now you know. Here we are.

Neal: I want to touch on that. Are you saying that because they don’t have the same demands that maybe the motivation for setting the goal is missing?

Nick: Yeah. Well, if the motivation is immediate… You’re going, “I need to do this because my boss told me X, so I have to do X, and I have to do it now.” My wife is nice, and she trusts me, and she didn’t say, “You have to do this right now.” It’s just the dynamics are so different. The trust is different. So, yeah. We have to look within ourselves for that motivation, which is a little sad. I don’t mean that to be negative, but it is a little jarring to go, “Why am I having to remember this?” That’s okay. That’s why we’re here.

Verbs: I think it could be said as well, just as you guys mentioned, that if it’s not a relational goal, most of the time it’s a performance goal that we know it’s “easier” to hit or accomplish that goal and then know, okay, well, I either missed it or I didn’t, versus knowing it’s a relational goal that we can’t necessarily control the goal because it’s involving another person and we don’t quite know how to gauge if we are being successful in this goal.

Nick: Michael likes to say you never drift to a destination where you want to be. Actually, recently, I was sitting on the couch with my beautiful wife. The kid had gone to sleep, and we were on our phones, or whatever, and I just looked up and I was like, “I’m going to die someday.”

Neal: Did you really say that?

Nick: I did. I was like, “And this is what we’re doing.” In the grand scheme of where this is headed, it’s not a surprise where we’re going, and I don’t want to have to look back on this and go, “Man, I’m glad I was on Twitter for an extra 10 to 15 minutes that night.” There is an element of knowing where it’s going. I know that’s so dark, but it really does set the stakes.

Neal: I know the next lead-in for my next date night. I’m going to sit my wife down and say, “Hey, we’re going to die someday.”

Nick: To be fair, I said I’m going to die someday. But that idea of drift… There are a few ways for you to know if a relationship is in drift. Again, this is any kind of relationship…not just with our spouses, but kids, coworkers. You feel like you’re kind of going through the motions. Maybe every day you find yourself doing the same thing or every weekend you find yourself doing the same thing. You’ve stopped being curious about how the other person is doing. You take for granted that they’re fine or they’re upset or whatever. It’s the normal.

You don’t feel connected to them in the same way. “Oh, we used to have such fun doing X. I remember we used to laugh on the phone,” or whatever it was. The last one is pretty obvious. You just miss them. During this time, this pandemic, that’s a big one. How many people we got in these habits of visiting or seeing or going to coffee, or whatever, and that has been taken away from us, and now we’re just missing them. The good news is… Neal, you know this. The good news is that you can just plan it out, get it back on track, and the best way to do that is setting a goal.

Neal: Obviously, the reason we’re all talking about this is that one of the ways we could start to think about setting relationship goals is considering our time. The way we invest our time reflects what we care about. I think there are so many of our listeners right now who don’t know if they really need to set a goal for their relationships, because as we were just talking about earlier, it’s hard to have that awareness about, “Hey, is my relationship in drift?” I know, Nick, you touched on a lot of those reasons.

There was one thing you said about quality time that I love. This is something my wife and I are constantly being aware of. Just because we’re in the same space doesn’t mean we are having quality time. Right now, my wife and I are double income, no kids. We just have a dog. We have a baby on the way. It’s easy when you’re in that life stage to think your relationships are good. Every night seems like date night because we’re always together, but just because we’re in the same space doesn’t mean we’re having that quality time. A lot of the ways my wife and I measure quality time is face-to-face interactions versus shoulder-to-shoulder interactions.

Verbs: That’s good.

Neal: Like, Nick, that example you had when you were sitting next to your wife and you said, “We’re going to die someday” and you were on your phone. That’s a shoulder-to-shoulder interaction. You guys are side by side, probably doing your own thing, probably watching TV. My wife and I like to measure quality times by the amount of face-to-face interactions we’re having where we’re truly engaging one another. If you are listening to this podcast and you’re thinking, “Hey, I haven’t had enough face-to-face time with my spouse, with my friends, with my parents,” that’s a clear sign that it’s time to set a relationship goal.

Nick: Verbs, you have so many bodies in that house.

Neal: That’s one way of putting it.

Nick: We’re just living creatures trying to make our way through this chaotic world. How do you manage your relationships? You have relationships at work. You have relationships at… How are you making sure the time is being scheduled in your life for the relationships that are important to you?

Verbs: Yeah, man. That’s a great question. I’ll say this. I’m probably wired as an introvert. Meaning, I do charge better when I’m on my own, my own thoughts. I can recharge like that. My wife is different. She likes to recharge around other people.

Neal: Yep. Same with us.

Verbs: Same setup. The thing I realized… It’s funny. Last year, when this whole lockdown happened and everybody was quarantining, and all of that, and we didn’t have the same amount of access to be face-to-face with people… For the first few weeks, I was like, “Man, this is pretty amazing. I don’t have to go out and interact. Nobody is scheduling meetings or anything like that. This is like an introvert’s heaven.”

But around about the two-month or three-month mark, I found myself starting to desire to have that face-to-face time with people outside of being on Zoom or outside of being on WhatsApp or FaceTime on the phone or anything like that. What it has forced me to do is, I think, exactly what you mentioned, Nick, on the couch with your wife. Look. At some point, we’re going to die.

Neal: Did you also say that to your wife?

Verbs: I did not, but it did make me process the time I am spending when I’m around the people who are my closest relationships, so, my wife and my kids. I had this thing I thought about at the beginning of the last year. Instead of just making a yearly goal for my relationships with my kids, I was challenged to think 10 years ahead. My daughter would be 18. My son would be 13. By the time we landed in 2030, where would I want our relationships to be?

That way, I can work backward and really seize the moments of the time I spend with them, because eventually, either they’re going to move out or I’m not going to be here, or whatever the case may be. So, how can I maximize on the time now and not just waste it or let it all go to scrolling through feeds on the phone and that sort of thing? I think just being in the same space, especially during the lockdown, forced us to be creative in what we do and to not settle for spending time frivolously on our own in separate rooms and that sort of thing.

Nick: Well, here’s a question for either of you. How do you schedule time like this? We use the SMARTER framework. We’re planner users. What does that look like? How do we make sure the time gets scheduled? How do we structure our goal?

Neal: I think one way we could start to set goals around our relationships and think practically how we can set aside time is to break it down into habit goals. A habit goal could be, for example, “Spend at least one hour with my kid every weekday.” That’s a habit goal, because it’s something you want to do on a recurring basis. Another example could be “Write my college best friend one letter before the last day of each month” or “Go on a walk with my spouse every evening.” These are habits. That could be one way of thinking about time. “What habits do I want to install, and who are the people I want to have these habits with?”

Verbs: Let me ask you this. What are some of the favorite ways you have to spend time with the people you love?

Nick: For us, we have a weekly movie night Friday night. I know it’s a little shoulder-to-shoulder, Neal, but it is organized by our 11-year-old. It’s called the JFFFF (the Jaworski Family Friday Film Festival).

Neal: I love that.

Nick: He has to organize who’s choosing for the next day and what we are watching. It all has to be settled. One of the things, of course, as Friday night comes around… Talking about the 90s. Remember standing in Blockbuster for four hours trying to pick the movie you’re going to watch. There’s no time for that in our busy lives, so we do that the day before.

Neal: I personally love one-on-one times with people. I am the life of the party. You guys know that.

Verbs: We know this.

Nick: We say it all the time.

Verbs: It’s official.

Neal: But I do prefer the one-on-one times with people, and those are my favorite moments with people. If I call up a friend like, “Hey, let’s go grab a coffee,” that’s my favorite time. I’m doing less of that now because, you know, global pandemic.

Nick: Oh, word?

Neal: Yeah, you know, there’s this global pandemic raging around the world right now, so I’m obviously spending less time one-on-one with people, and usually, when we do spend time one-on-one, it’s six feet apart and with a mask, but that’s how I love spending my time with people.

Nick: What about you, Verbs?

Verbs: It’s funny you mentioned movie night. That became a newfound tradition in our home. Again, it is kind of the shoulder-to-shoulder, but beyond that… This last season of The Mandalorian, we all got on the couch and watched it on a Friday night, and we actually looked forward to that every week because everybody was in the same room. It gave us conversation around the show and what was happening, even some of the plots and the storylines. It created conversation as a family around these episodes of The Mandalorian. That became one of our favorite things to do on a Friday night as a family.

Neal: Let me just say, both of you guys made a distinction, like, “Yes, those are shoulder-to-shoulder times,” but I think shoulder-to-shoulder times are great when it’s an experience like that. Making an experience of something, like a Friday movie night… An experience is something you look forward to, it’s something you enjoy, it’s something that bonds you with other people, and it’s something you can look back on and remember, so I think it’s fine if you make an experience of things.

Nick: Yeah, a movie night doesn’t work quite as well if no one else is there. You can watch a movie by yourself, but there is something about the togetherness of it that works well. What we found is that because we’re rotating who chooses, there is an element of being able to expose each other to interests we each have. If you’re always defaulting to “What does the kid want to watch?” or “What does the adult want to watch?” or whatever, you end up with the same stuff all the time. That in and of itself has been really nice to go, “Oh, I never would have watched this if not for the JFFFF.”

Neal: So, if you feel like you don’t have time for a relational goal, that might be a sure sign that you actually need one. Right?

Nick: Again, your kid is not usually going to force you to hang out with them. Your mother probably is like, “He’s so busy. I remember that.” But if you don’t have any of these goals and you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t have time for any of this,” then things are probably a little out of balance.

Verbs: And the opportunity is right in front of you to develop a relational goal. Absolutely.

Nick: Yeah. Look at that. What an opportunity.

Neal: There you go.

Verbs: So, the second category is knowledge. There can be this assumption that we’re just supposed to know, that people are just born with this ability to cultivate these fantastic relationships, but that’s not the case. What we know or think we know is also limited by our experience. In fact, we could think we know things that are actually just flat-out wrong.

The good news is we do have access to more information on how to build healthy relationships probably than ever before in history. If there’s an area of relating you’ve noticed you struggle with, there’s probably a resource that exists that you can use to help expand your knowledge. Neal, I’m assuming you do a lot of reading, whether it’s articles or books.

Neal: Good assumption.

Verbs: You consume these resources to help you along with the things you set as far as goals-wise. Is there anything you kind of lean on that would speak to the relational aspect?

Neal: Let me just say this. This is probably a plug for my wife. My wife is a therapist. It’s just the best being married to a therapist.

Nick: Hold on, Neal. Before you finish that sentence, that, to me, sounds like the answer of somebody who is balanced. I think some other people would go, “It sucks to be married to a therapist.” I’m saying that’s a real check in your favor in terms of having done the work to be able to say that.

Neal: People always ask me, “What is it like being married to a therapist?” and I’m like, “It’s the best.” They have the best listening skills, and they have this encyclopedic knowledge of how relationships work and what’s healthy in life. If I’m having a problem with a relationship of mine or if we’re having conflict problems, I feel like my wife Carly has all the knowledge in the world about healthy relationships, just what it means to be vulnerable and why it matters, how to become more resilient to shame, how to notice your triggers in relationships. I live with a wealth of information.

So, one resource I lean on is my wife, but other than that, because we are a very therapeutic family… We talk about therapy all the time. Our bookshelves are littered with books on relationships and how to make them healthy and how to be vulnerable, how to be emotional and transparent in your relationships. I’m looking at my bookshelf right now. Some are Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend; Safe People by Cloud and Townsend as well; Radical Candor, Kim Scott; Daring Greatly by good ol’ Brené Brown; Rising Strong, Brené Brown; Scary Close by Donald Miller. These are great books that have really helped me in my journey.

Verbs: That’s good. Like you mentioned, there are books we can use as a resource. Obviously, podcasts can also help us in this area. We cannot say “podcast” and pass up on the opportunity, Nick, to kind of pick at your brain a little bit. You have a podcast called Shame Rules!

Nick: I do currently.

Verbs: Tell us about it. What kinds of things do you tackle on the show?

Nick: I truly did not expect this kind of plug. This is exciting.

Verbs: It’s here, and we are here now, and you will shamelessly…

Neal: You can send us money after this episode for that plug.

Nick: Just to take one step back… It’s funny. I do have a lot of shame over that I don’t think I read as much as I should, but then when I really think about it, I listen to so many podcasts all day. I think sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the time and how we choose to spend it. If you’re sitting there going, “Well, I want to focus on my relationships,” there are so many podcasts. There’s Where Should We Begin? by Esther Perel. That’s about marriage. We have Unruffled by Janet Lansbury. It’s on parenting. Unlocking Us is a Brené Brown podcast.

Neal: That’s so good.

Nick: She’s a wealth of information. And Shame Rules! which is my show. Shame is an important part of how we have relationships with those around us and with ourselves, so, obviously, I recommend that. And, Verbs, you have a podcast that is also about relationships in a way. Correct?

Neal: Uh-oh. Double plug.

Verbs: I do. Double plug. You got me. Touché. I worked on a podcast a while ago called Today Is Tomorrow centered around fatherhood and how we can maximize on the time we spend as dads with our children, considering the fact that as we grow as people and we grow in our relationships, our children are going to do the same thing. They’re going to have seasons where something shifts and they grow up, and then we would need to adjust our parenting and how we approach our fatherhood by paying attention to those seasons in both of our lives. So, yeah, that’s another podcast resource that’s out there for you.

Neal: I think the point is if there’s anything you don’t know about relationship, there’s an expert who knows it, and you can access their knowledge, their insight, pretty easily.

Nick: Like, now.

Verbs: All right. Let’s hop to the third category, which is skills. You’ve considered the time, you’ve considered the knowledge, and now let’s work on the skills portion of it. Relationships require more than just knowledge. Obviously, we know that. You can have all the head knowledge in the world, but it doesn’t do you any good if you’re not putting it into practice.

You can create a goal around practicing any relational skill you want to improve. For instance, something I’m trying to get better at is question asking, making sure I’m inquiring, whether it be about my wife’s day, whether it be about my kids’ day at school, just inquiring and engaging them in that way. That’s something, for me, that I’m trying to implement and be more consistent in implementing in my own relationships.

Nick: Something I’ve been working on… I feel like I’m a pretty good people person.

Neal: You are.

Nick: Thank you, Neal. So are you. So are you, Verbs. Look at this. We’re engaging.

Neal: So nice.

Nick: Positivity. One thing I’ve really been working on and very aware of… I grew up with a lot of… I had a lot of guy friends, and there’s a certain energy to that at times. One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that I’m very, very quick to interrupt a story with a joke or a digression. Someone is trying to tell me something and I go, “Oh yeah, it’s like that thing,” and it’s not the time for that.

Someone is trying to tell me… It could be my mom. It could be my brother. It could be my wife. It could be the kid. “Oh, it’s like that other thing.” It’s like, just wait. It’s something I really am focusing on. It worked kind of well with a bunch of 19- or 20-year-old guys who were trying to be the funniest, but when you’re trying to establish and maintain these relationships that you need to survive, it gets in the way of it. So, that’s what I’ve been working on.

Neal: Man, so good. This makes me think about the importance of expressing your emotions. I think that’s a skill. Again, my wife is a therapist. I wonder how many times I could say that in this episode.

Nick: Oh, she is?

Neal: Yeah, she is. I feel like we are good at expressing our emotions just because we always talk about emotions and how they show up in people, so we always have those breakfast conversations about, “Hey, how do you feel this morning? How are you feeling right now?” We do that a couple of times throughout the day, like, “Hey, just checking in. What’s up? I know you had that hard thing at work. Was that okay?” I think that’s a skill: to grow in your transparency and express your emotions with your spouse, even with friends, with your parents, just doing that emotional check-in.

Nick: So, Neal, how would we convert that into a habit goal?

Neal: Maybe it could be “Do an emotional check-in with my spouse every Saturday morning after brunch” or maybe even every day during breakfast. It seems small, because it’s a small action. It takes like 10 seconds to ask that question, but if you really zoom out, it’s actually a really huge goal. This demands the significance of a goal, because this is important. These are our most important relationships. So, something as simple as doing an emotional check-in with your spouse, with your friend, with your parents, whatever… That’s important. I think that could totally be a goal.

Verbs: Most goals around practice should be habit goals, because it’s a repeated action that creates a long-term change in our behavior. Let’s hop into the fourth category, which is new adventures. It’s not just being together that could be meaningful, but it’s taking it that step beyond and saying, “What are some exciting things we can do together?”

Nick: Early on in this pandemic, we moved. Once it became clear that schools were shutting down, we were like, “Let’s go now before the market figures out what’s happening,” so we moved. But we’ve all been locked in. At some point, I was like, “We’ve got to get out in the world and do something.” I don’t know why it happened, but between my son and me, we set a goal that we were going to go shoot off Diet Coke two-liter bottles with Mentos.

That was a thing he wrote in his planner. It was like, “We’re going to build a launcher. We’re going to test out different kinds. We’re going to do these things.” That was literally written on his student planner as something to do, and that’s something he still references. You know, it’s gross and sticky. We got to go to a big ol’ abandoned parking lot and shoot all this stuff off, and people drove by and were like, “Oh, that’s so cool.” It’s the kind of thing you might do at school but no one was in school to do anymore.

Or here’s a fun thing. This is all about my son, so I’m sorry, everybody. I think it applies to adults as well. One time I was like, “You need to do something fun this week. You need to do a new thing. This is all the same.” So we brainstormed words, essentially, and then we came up with the phrase bike party. It was like, “Friday you’re throwing a bike party.” He was like, “What’s a bike party?” I was like, “We don’t know what a bike party is.”

Let me tell you…I swear to God…that Friday, without any of my… I said, “If you throw a bike party, I’ll buy pizzas for it.” That was my only part of it. Without any planning on my part, six kids show up with their bikes and speakers and a tent. They got a tent from somewhere and tables and snacks, and they freakin’ had a bike party.

Neal: I want to have a bike party. That’s so fun.

Nick: They rode around, and they brough a ramp over. There were all kinds of fun stuff. It really was just about being intentional in setting the goal. Writing it down, even without certainty as to what it might look like, has provided some of the highlights of this pandemic.

Neal: Man, that’s so good. Three years ago, I set about creating a relationship goal for a new adventure. Around that time, I had just let go of my business. I was just joining Michael Hyatt & Company and just being intentional about the year. I knew it was going to be tough. I was kind of mourning letting go of the business while also balancing that with the excitement of joining Michael Hyatt & Company, so I was intentional.

I said, “Hey, let’s have a vacation together,” because I also acknowledged that in my business I wasn’t living the double win and there were times where my relationships suffered. So, I was being proactive that year, and I said, “Hey, let’s go on a vacation together this year.” I made that relationship goal. My wife and I went on this awesome cruise. It was great. We came back refreshed and refueled. That’s an example of a new adventure.

Nick: Verbs, what about you? Do you have any new adventures in there?

Verbs: I actually set this as a goal last year: to be able to spend more creative time with my kids individually. What that has looked like… My youngest enjoys building anything with Legos, so a couple of weeks ago we went to Starbucks. It was him and me. He brought his Lego box with him, so we just built whatever we wanted to build out of Legos sitting there in Starbucks with a cup of hot chocolate. We don’t really do that often as far as individually, but for him and me it meant the world to be able to spend that time and continue to cultivate our relationship as father and son. So, that’s one of my goals this year: to continue to do that with all of my children more consistently this year.

All right, folks. The good news is you don’t have to watch your most important relationships drift. You can create exciting, effective relational goals by considering four categories: time, knowledge, skills, and new adventures. Gentlemen, do you have any final thoughts for our Focus on This listeners?

Neal: I’m curious, just because Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, what’s your spiciest Valentine’s Day advice you could give for our listeners? Go.

Nick: Oh my gosh. During a pandemic?

Neal: Keep it PG.

Nick: Here’s what I’ll say. We actually have started doing more meal planning in my house, which is a little tangential at this point. One thing we did over winter break which is relevant to this is we learned how to make tonkatsu ramen from scratch.

Neal: What? You have the coolest household.

Nick: The significance of that is that our first date, where she lied to me about having had ramen before, was to a ramen restaurant, so we took the time. We’ve done it a couple of times now, and we’re about to do it again, because you can eat it once a week. It’s really filling when it’s cold and other stuff. There is something about, I think, planning to make a meal. Maybe it’s a meal that’s significant to you. We have all of these dreams of the things we would want to go eat when we can go out again, so maybe an idea might be to do something like that. Make it together and be excited about sharing that and eating it and learning. That’s my thought.

Neal: So good. What about you, Verbs?

Verbs: I don’t know if this is going to be helpful for you, Neal, just depending on you and your wife and how you normally roll. We actually try to not do something on Valentine’s Day just because everybody else is doing something on the day. So, figuring out which end of Valentine’s, whether it’s that weekend or before, just so we can have a little bit more space to actually enjoy the holiday itself. But saying that to say, whatever you do, make sure you plan it. Like, actually plan what’s about to happen, how it’s going to happen, and go from there.

Neal: I feel like a plug for the planner should go there.

Verbs: It should.

Neal: Plan it in your Full Focus Planner.

Nick: Right now.

Verbs: If it’s not in your Quarterly Preview already, make sure you sneak that into your Weekly Preview, because it is coming. It is approaching quickly.

Nick: Neal, what about you?

Neal: I would say that Valentine’s Day is not your opportunity to have a business meeting with your spouse or partner. People look to these milestones to have a romantic occasion because they’re not around each other a lot sometimes.

They look forward to these milestones, but then when we’re celebrating, we can deal with the sabotage of starting to talk about business matters of family, like, “Oh, when should we do this?” or “Did we pay that bill?” or “What’s going on next week again? What are we doing tomorrow?” These are business matters, and I don’t think Valentine’s Day has room for that. I think the gift of Valentine’s Day is that it’s time where you grow in intimacy and have those transparent conversations, and having business conversations sabotages that.

Verbs: Well, thank you for joining us on Focus on This.

Nick: This is the most productive podcast on the Internet, so please share it with your friends. Remember to use #focusonthispodcast.

Neal: And be here next week for another great episode.

Verbs: Until then…

All: Stay focused!