You don't always get the help that you're hoping for or wanting. How do you
save your marriage by yourself?
Obviously marriage is a team sport. You can't be married to yourself. Actually, I
think I may have seen something on YouTube about someone who married
themselves. But that's just weird. It's a team sport. It takes 2, right? Well,
not so fast. You've heard that marriage is a 50/50
kind of a proposition? You do your half, I'll do mine?
Let's meet in the middle. You've heard all of the analogies. That never works
very well in my experience. Because let's be honest, you're doing your half, right?
So, here's something that I have found works a whole lot better.
95/5. 95/5. Let's assume for just a moment that this is 95%
on you. And we're going to expect about 5% from your lovely
spouse. Honestly, anybody with a pulse can do 5%. Which means that your
spouse is already doing enough. And if this is going to improve, it's up to you.
Now, little disclaimer. I agree with you that
your spouse should probably do more to support this marriage. I agree with you.
That there's probably been some misbehavior. There's some things that
could be going better over there. Yeah, I get it. But you don't control your spouse.
That's why we're having this conversation. If it's up to you, which I'm
saying it's 95% on you. Then what are you going to do. To improve or save this
marriage. And that happens to be a useful line of thinking.
So get into 95/5 mode with me here for a minute and let's talk about a few
principles. In fact, there's 9 of them that I think you could start working on
immediately by yourself even if your spouse isn't enrolled.
The first one is positivity. I share principles of positivity all the time on
this channel. That's because it's a foundational fundamental principle that
changes everything about how we're going to approach the marriage question.
Positivity is not just the trite-fluffy, "Oh, just think positive." That you hear
from the motivational speakers out there. No. This is a solid psychological
principle that determines the outcomes. And it's based on 2 different
processes that are going on in your mind. Evaluation and creation. Evaluation is
where you're judging. Your judging your relationship, you're judging yourself,
you're judging you're circumstances, you're constantly judging. You can't turn it off.
Notice that you're doing it. Judging in a particular way is a choice. So trick
question for you. How's your marriage? Now, notice that you have a judgment about
them. And however you're judging it is totally a choice. Could we make an
argument for example that your marriage is really good? Why, yes we could. Because
if we compare it to one that's worse, it's going to seem like this one is pretty
good. What have you been comparing it to? Usually compared to something better and
then you feel worse about what you've got.
So, positivity just means let's start from a good place.
Honestly, if we want to get to something better what's the shortest distance to
better. If we start from good or if we start from this is awful? We get to
choose where we start. That's what positivity is all about.
This is almost magical and that's why I wanted to start you with that. In some
other videos here on the channel, if you look at the positive relationships
resources playlist, you're going to find several videos there that will give you
additional ideas. In terms of these principles, there are 9 that I like to
focus on in my coaching. I'm not going to go into all 9 in this particular
video. Because I want to give you 2 brain hacks. 2 very specific things
that you can do around this first principle. Positivity to make this
marriage better by yourself. Even if your spouse isn't participating. And the first
one is gratitude. Gratitude. Get into a positive evaluation of your relationship
right now. You have to be able to see that it is good. Oh, I know. I know it
could be better. And I'll get behind your creation project all day long. I want you
to have an upgrade. Trust me. The best way for you to get that upgrade is to
realize that you don't need one. So starting from a positive evaluation
actually powers up your ability to create the upgrade. Gratitude is the
fastest way I know to get there. So try this. I call it 25/5. 25/5. Write this down somewhere.
25/5. Now, 5 stands for 5 days. Starting today. You make a
physical written list of 25 things for which you are sincerely grateful. Now,
don't make this up you have to actually be grateful for it to put it on your
list. Don't pretend. I want it to be stuff
you're actually grateful for. Here's what powers it up. At least half of your list
every day. That's 13 if you're doing the math. At least half of your
list is about your spouse or your marriage. The way it is right now without
changing anything. Not the way it could be. I mean the way it is.
And remember, you have to be grateful for it to put it on your list.
Don't pretend. And you don't repeat anything on tomorrow's list that was on
today's list. Whole new list tomorrow. You with me?
So 13 of your list every day is about your spouse or your marriage. You
do this for 5 days. You're going see some really interesting things happening
inside of your own mind. And I think you're going to start seeing some things
happening in your marriage too. That is a powerful hack and it goes
right along with that first principle that we were talking about, positivity.
Now, there's another process. Not only are we evaluating our life constantly. And
our marriage and our relationship. We're also busy creating what is to be. And I
don't mean what it is at this point. I mean what is to be and that doesn't
exist yet. Because we haven't created it yet. In order to get to a positive
creation mode, we need to focus our imagination on what could be better. So
here's the brain hack for you. I call it BB-8. Standing for, Better By 8. What
time is it right now? Just take a look at you watch. Okay. How sure are you that
8 o'clock is coming? Pretty sure? Yeah, it's coming. Okay. How sure are you that
you're going to be around for 8 o'clock? I mean living and breathing, still on the
planet? Pretty sure? Awesome. Here's the catch. At 8 o'clock. which is coming
for sure, you're going to be around, right? I used to think that there were 3
options. I've eliminated one because I don't think that it's possible for
things to be exactly the same at 8 o'clock as they are right now.
At the very least, you're going to be a couple hours older.
Right? You might be more tired, more hungry. I don't know. It depends on what
you did just before 8. Things have to be different. And by your own evaluation or
judgment which you can't turn off, things have to be at 8 o'clock either better or
worse than they are right now, by your own judgement. Now, you and I both know
that you could make things worse by 8:00. Please don't do this. Use your creative
energy to find some way to make things better by 8:00. You got it? You did and it
can be a little better or a lot better. I don't care, you figure something out. If
you will do this for the same 5 days that you're doing the gratitude, you get
to have 10 upgrades to this relationship. And you did it by yourself. How cool is
that? Sure, marriage is a team sport. But you've
got this because there's things you can personally do. Please share this video
with someone that you think would benefit from it. And I'll see you again tomorrow.