Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: It's been a massive year here on living the team life and after 60 episodes of relationship conversations, we've decided to do something a little different today and take a little trip down memory lane and look back at our five most popular episodes according to Spotify and Apple. Enjoy.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Hey, we're Kim and Rog and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should, we think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house dripping business, we've achieved some big dreams and most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Pick conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfort in whatever tickles you pickle, and enjoy living the team life and our number one episode, you, our audience, have listened to over the last twelve to 14 months. Is love is a doing word. In this one, we talk about being proactive in your relationship and how often people will feel that they've lost connection in their relationship with their partner, or their partner's changed or they, they haven't changed, but somehow there's a disconnect. But what they don't realize is that love is something that needs to be done.
Love is a doing word. You need to proactively go about doing love. And we go through the nuts and bolts of that in this clip.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And that's what we really want to unpack today, is how do we remember to do love?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah, but by stating that love is a verb, you're implying that love is not just a feeling or this emotion that goes through us, that it's an active choice and requires effort, it requires action. And you show love by doing things.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think in the beginning that's probably something that comes up really easily. And we know and we've talked about before, the chemical of cocktails that people.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Experience in the beginning, the cocktail of chemicals even.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: What did I say chemical of cocktails. Sorry, the cocktail of chemicals. Guilt. Mercedes, back to first, the cocktail of chemicals that we experienced in the beginning. And those chemicals feel so good that they actually, they motivate us to undertake behaviours. So to be doing things that are going to support our efforts to receive more of the chemicals, it's just how our brains work. We feel good with the chemicals, so we think to ourselves as the problem solvers we are as humans, how can I do more to get more of this chemical or this feeling that I'm having? And so we think about things like what food would my partner like, what meal could I prepare that would make them happy? What activities might my partner enjoy, my new partner enjoy? What sort of dates could I plan for us? What way could I support them? How can I show them that I am comforting them, that I'm holding space for them actively when they're struggling or when they want to discuss something more deeply? And we're very deliberate in our actions to show love by doing things because we are so highly motivated. I mean, we've got that additional motivation. The cocktail of chemicals. As time wears on and the chemicals start to wane, we do often find ourselves less motivated to do love.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: That 1st 18 to 24 months of a relationship, the romantic period, you know, where everything's about passion, your body is just naturally pumping you with dopamine and all these cool cocktails. Sorry, cool. I've done it. Well, I say, actually I think we did have a lot of cocktails in those 1st 18 to 24 months. And what happens though is that after those 18 to 24 months where your body's pushing for all those things that Kim talked about, how can I make my partner happy? I've got all this love and emotion. I just want to please them. I want to make them feel good. I want them to make me feel good. After that, our bodies, our bodies are like, all right, my work's done, it's up to you. And so we go from this romantic love to this more enduring love. It's a more deeper and stronger connection, but it takes work. And I can see how in our super busy lives how we might feel that we can just set and forget love because we feel we did all this hard work up front. You know, we had all this passion up front, we had all the nookie up front, but we haven't at any stage been taught the importance of this. And you know, that's a huge part of why Kim and I do this podcast, because so much of what we do in our lives is about you put in work and you see reward. Yet when it comes to a relationship, we don't seem to find that correlation. It definitely seems like we have this. This social thing of love should just be set and forget.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think you're hitting the nail on the head with that comment that we're not actually taught this stuff. I don't think we discuss enough how much nurturing a relationship requires. And that's what we're really getting to the guts of today. The do thinking about what you're doing in the relationship. That's really what we're wanting to drive home. You can't be passive in the relationship at any point. You're not at the beginning naturally, because you're driven by the chemicals. The brain just. It's like it's such an advantage. Do you know what I mean? It's a bit of a cheat at the beginning because you're so heavily motivated to chase down more and more of the chemicals. But once they wane and you do end up in what you described Rogie as the enduring space, it's very easy to get caught up in the day to day and without, you know, it being something that people really talk about, discuss, what are you doing for your relationship? You know, what are you guys actively doing for each other? And it's no different to anything in our lives that we have to nurture, garden, whatever it is. A car needs refueling. Like, everything needs ongoing effort. It needs an ongoing action plan, something to be doing to actively support the health of whatever it is. And in this case, it's the relationship, the connection in the relationship. And if we aren't taking the action and we're just allowing what we think is love to exist, it's not going to sustain the relationship.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: I think one of the most dangerous assumptions we can make in our lives is that our love will be maintained and continue to grow strong, or at least stay at the same level it was without us actually actively and proactively doing anything about it.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And I think there's this idea that I think some people take in, or a lot of couples take in because they don't know anything else that we were, we're a good couple and that's enough.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Yeah, we were a good couple. Why aren't we a good couple now? Shouldn't the past be a good indication of what the future's going to be? We know that's not right.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: The other part of that, Reggie, is maybe one partner is still thinking you're a good couple and everything's fine. And for the other partner, that need has heightened because it's not being fed. So they're actually feeling like I am disconnecting from the relationship. And that is a real risk that one partner will need the doing quicker and more than the other partner. They will notice the gap faster.
Okay, in the next episode, we wanted to share with you guys. It's the actually the four communication red flags for your relationship. And we're not at all surprised that this was a really popular episode for our audience.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Good.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: I think what happens is in relationships, a lot of relationships, we've definitely had this in the past, end up in a difficult and detrimental style or pattern of communication, but they don't have a name for what's happening, and that can be really difficult. You just feel like it's frustrating. You're stuck, and neither of you can articulate what's actually going on. So what we tried to do in this episode was give you guys some language around some of the more negative styles of communication. Not so that you can just point it out, but actually empowering you to be able to recognize when it's happening and make a positive change. And this seemed to land very well with you guys. So we thought we'd share a powerful little clip from this episode.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: The fourth horseman of the apocalypse is stonewalling. Now, I'll make a generalization here, but actually, Gottman does back this up, and he says that this is more of. More of something that blokes do. And I can 100% say that I do it less now. I probably still do it a bit, but stonewalling was my number one horseman. Like, you know, I could have gone on one of those prancing shows on the stonewalling horse, the. What's it called?
[00:09:47] Speaker B: I have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: At the Olympics, where they wear the dressage. The dressage. So pretty much, I would have been at the dressage stonewalling horseman Olympics. So with the pretty ribbons in the horseman's hair and all that sort of stuff, because I would often just be like, I'm too tired to have this conversation. I've just got home from work, babe. Why don't you give me a break? What I was continually doing when Kim wanted to address something with me is that I was withdrawing, shutting down, closing my off, and really walking away from the discussion and the issue.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah, this is one that really often shows up after the other three have come about because. And in a repetitive way, as well, so you get faster at stonewalling. You know, it comes in earlier in the conversation as you move on, and you see more and more of the criticism and the contempt and the defensiveness, and eventually the stonewalling just comes in earlier and earlier because the conversation is unproductive and it's not an enjoyable space. And whichever partner stonewalls one or maybe both, even decides, I don't want to engage in that anymore, I can't be bothered with that anymore. And it's a really painful one for the person who's being stonewalled because you're left feeling very unseen. There's no acknowledgement for the fact that you're still standing there making the effort. It is, it might seem like it's not a big deal when someone checks out of a conversation, but it can be very detrimental and very painful to the partner that's been left hanging in the conversation.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: You're just not dealing with it, are you? You're walking away so you don't have to deal with it. And of course, that will just leave your partner feeling abandoned, frustrated, and undervalued. They'll be like, I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. You know, I feel like we never communicate. I feel like we never talk. Well, you don't. And what happens is that if you're not having those important conversations, if you're not resolving issues, if you're constantly walking away, and what happens? It becomes a habit. And that little divide between you can, over time, become a chasm.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: I think. Absolutely the divide grows. But also, I mean, people talk about apathy as the great killer in a relationship, and I couldn't agree more. You continue to stonewall your partner. One day they're going to say, you know what? I'm not going to bother with this anymore. They are simply not listening to me. They're not engaging, they're not trying with me. Why am I trying?
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And I can. Look, I can understand. Well, Kim and I can understand how this happens. So I'll take you back in time, you know, to the first ten years of our relationship, where Kim might have come up with a harsh startup, with some criticism because I hadn't done something, but she attacked my character. And as a result, because I didn't know how to manage the situation, I was maybe overwhelmed with the feelings or I felt I was being attacked, and probably more so that I just didn't want to take accountability for what I had done. I would just walk away. That just built up resentment in Kim for me. I would feel like I'd get defensive and be like, well, I had to walk away because I was attacked. So you can see how these things interlock and interplay with each other, and you just end up in a really awful, repetitive circle.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Our third most popular episode on living the team life was actually about stress, and it was called how to reduce stress in your relationship. This is actually one of my favorites, and I actually brought it to the table, even though it's one of, you know, Kim's little things. It was because we discussed the stress cup, because this is something that Kim had told me about many years ago, and I still use it to today to understand that. Why am I so stressed? Nothing majors happened in my life. Well, actually, as Kim taught me and as we told the audience, as we told you, is that it's not just the big things. It's actually lots of little things that gradually start to fill your stress cup. And what I loved about this clip we're about to show you is Kim takes us through a visualization exercise of a woman's morning and how the little things that happen from when she wakes up to pretty much her first half an hour at work had started to fill her stress cup already.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: So the next thing I want to do is just because we're really just trying to get our heads around this concept and get that visualization going of what the stress cup looks like, how it fills up, and how we can create more capacity by opening the tap and letting some of the water out. So what I'm going to do is just walk through just a half day in the life of a woman who might be experiencing a little bit of stress. But really, it's more about just highlighting how the little things, remember I said it's cumulative. It's the sum of all the things in this cup. So you, you might be adding 10 water at a time, but if you got lots of little things adding up, that is going fast towards the full capacity of that cup.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Well, I think we'll start by saying this woman's cup is already half full.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Oh, there you go.
Just identify. Let me say exactly.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: There's not too many people whose stress cups are completely empty.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Right? Like, what would that even look like?
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Well, I don't know. It's a stress cup, not a beer cup.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: I think. Absolutely. That's almost impossible. And I think there are people, like monks, who work towards, they don't work towards actually removing stress. They work towards building their awareness and living with the stress in a different way. But let's look at the day, half a day of this imaginary person. Okay, so imagine yourself. You toss and turn in the night because your partner is snoring and you're cold.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Wait, is this me or Smyrta being.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Basically, this is red Bruce Lee on.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: My own line, pretty close to home.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Okay, that adds to the cup.
You go to get dressed, you wake up. You go to get dressed for work and realise you don't have clean clothes to wear. Add to the cup, you spend 15 minutes racing around the house looking for something clean. You find nothing you want to wear and you're now running late. Add to the cup. You look across at the kitchen table as you race past where you've left your partner to feed the kids and see that only the unhealthy occasional cereals so the ones that are meant for special treats have been placed out and the kids have selected these. Add to the cup, you get to the car frazzled. Throw the kids in the back and hit play on your phone without thinking.
It plays an intense podcast about improving your life. And although you really don't feel like it, you feel too rushed to switch to some relaxing music.
Add to the cup, you get to school, drop off the kids, jump out of the car and you look at their backpacks and realise both of them are missing their water bottles. You start panicking about them having headaches all day and being dehydrated. Add to the cup, you race off to work, still listening to the overwhelming podcast. Add to the cup, you get to work. Sit straight down at your desk, skipping your usual morning tea and start working because you're late. You open your emails and see 25 new emails. Add to the cup, you tell yourself as you see these emails, you'll just skip lunch to make up time and quietly scold yourself for not having done the washing, wasting time this morning looking for clean clothes for getting the kids water bottles and you agree with yourself that skipping lunch is your deserved punishment.
Add to the cup.
It's pretty crazy.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Well, that just sounds like a typical normal day. Not even a bad day, you know?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: No, I didn't. I didn't go extreme here. I just want people to understand like how much this happens throughout the day. On an average day when you get.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Home, your partner will say, how was your day? You'll probably go, fine, fine. You wouldn't see it as has anything exceptional having happened, as any large meteors have hit your day and blown it up. It just seems like a typical day. And I mean, most of us yearn for a typical day. But you can see how that, because it is just a typical day, nothing exceptional has happened, but you've just had these constant stresses just compounding. Compounding. Building, building. And that's what that you only took us through half a day.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Not even. I took you to about 09:00 a.m.
Like, realistically I did. I went to 09:00 a.m.. Yeah.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: So you can see how that they, you know, those pressures and those stressors can just compound, and then you've got the rest of the day. And if you're not doing things to reduce that stress on a typical day, you can see how you can really hit the red zone. And, gee, what happens if something does go wrong really bad? Are you going to be able to cope?
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Absolutely. You're really using up your capacity on the day to day stuff, as you say, Rog.
All right, so our fourth most popular episode, three simple steps to start the conversation with your partner, was exactly, as the title says, a small, I guess, guide for you guys on how you could get started in a really simple way. If you were feeling like you weren't having construction conversations or you would, you were struggling to even get into the conversation with your partner these days. And we got a little bit raw. Rog and I talked a lot in this episode about our own experiences in terms of struggles in the past, getting into conversations and getting going. Rog shared that he had a fear of conflict and a fear of the where the conversation would go and, and not taking, perhaps, accountability or responsibility.
I definitely shared as well about my own struggles to create space for a constructive conversation. So how to give Rog enough space to be able to actually enter safely into the conversation and feel safe in doing that. And obviously, we spoke about how we got past these struggles that we had and the challenges we had, and really did learn how to begin conversing again and conversing constructively together and how important that is for your relationship. This was a great one.
So we really are talking about making a shift in the relationship, as I've said, to a different state, where it's the rhythm of the relationship that you are talkers. You know, you are going to go from being people who don't talk to people who do talk. You're going to go from people who don't share to people who do share.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: Why it's important is because if we're not talking about the little things, we're not sharing the little things. We're not having these sort of little conversations, then we definitely aren't talking about the big things. Big decisions require big discussions. And if we're not having them, then we're not taking control of our lives. Because if we're not having discussions with our partners, we're making uninformed decisions, we're making one sided decisions. We're making decisions that might break trust and connectedness, and we're also maybe losing control of our lives.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right, though, Rogie. It is ultimately about whether you want to be intentional in life together as a team, or whether you're going to be unintentional. And that's that floating through life that's being out of control in life. There's so much in this one precious life you can do. There's so much you can be in this one precious life.
If you're not intentional about it, if you're not deliberate with your partner, that's never going to happen.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Guessing and making assumptions about where your partner wants to go, where you want to go, and where you want to go together. Gee, that's so. It's such a risk. It's your life. And yet we so easily fall into that pattern. And again, we don't want to. We don't want to be judgmental or blame me because we did it for ten years, but we just know how good it is on the other side.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Yes. I love that. All right, let's unpack then, a little bit about why we see people having difficulties in talking together. Because I think it's really important to name these and have them out there for people to understand. This is actually what might be contributing to your difficulties. Some people might say, yeah, we have trouble, but I don't know why we have trouble. So let's run through a few of these. First off, people often have a fear of conflict.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Fear of conflict was a massive one for me. A lot of it was to do with the, the emotional intensity of some of our discussions because we had let them simmer for so long and because I was constantly just avoiding them. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. By the time we got to have the conversations, they were huge, they were heavy, and I just wasn't emotionally prepared for the intensity of them.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: I think fear of conflict runs both genders. I know a lot of women who will do literally anything to avoid conflict. I can't tell you how many times I've had a conversation with someone and they've brought up something that's really upset them. Not just in the romantic relationship, something in life. And they've said, but I just didn't want to deal with the conflict. I'm not a conflict person. Nobody is a conflict person, let me tell you. But it's the truth of it.
So many people say I'm not a conflict person. Nobody's nervous system is built to want to be disrupted. It's not how we're wired as humans. But the reality is you're going to have a little bit of discomfort when you get to the table. That's life. When you are. I mean, how much discomfort do we go through in a day when we're yabbering away at each other?
[00:23:48] Speaker A: I think a lot of, in the development space, the motivational space, they talk about get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it's very true. Sometimes it can see a bit nap when it. When they talk about it, but it is really true that you do need to get comfortable being uncomfortable in conversations with your partner. And, you know, I think another one of the reasons I used to avoid conflict was because I also didn't want to address certain issues in my life or our lives. And so it wasn't just the conflict, it was the actual topic matter as well. Where I was, especially my twenties, I was like, gee, I don't want to have to deal with that. I don't have to deal with that now because there'll be a resolution out of it, or I'll, you know, maybe it's something I'm ashamed of, or maybe it's something I'll need to change, which means I'll need. I'll need it to do more. And so, like, everything we do, when we don't really want to do it, we put it off.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, like, I just have to counter that with my, my position in our twenties, because it certainly wasn't all you as the reason that we didn't talk. I think I brought a very black and white perspective to the table. It was one way or the other. And when our conversation didn't go the way that I expected it to or wanted it to, I was very reactive to the conversation. And I think that would have scared you as well. I look back now and, you know, obviously I've developed my skills a lot in that space and, and my own. I've done a lot of introspective work and my own personal development and journey. But the reality is, it would have been hard for you because I was a very black and white person then, and I struggled to see the world outside of that black and white. And so, obviously, you know, it was hard for you, who wasn't always in black and white, you're definitely more grey. Naturally, it would have been a difficult space.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: All right, so our fifth most popular episode of living the team life of all time was actually our first episode. Is your relationship stuck? I love that our first episode still makes the top five. Maybe because maybe it's the first episode that pops up, but I know a lot of the times it's not the first episode. You have to scroll all the way down the bottom to get it. But this is something that Kim and I identified first. Started doing our research for the show as something we believe many couples face. And in this excerpt, we actually, again, get a bit real and raw about how we ourselves used to feel really stuck during the early to middle part of our relationship, which is now 22 years young or old.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, let's unpack what being stuck actually means. And the first clue I would give to people that they might be stuck in a relationship is a sense of being stuck on loop. So that means that behaviors in the relationship, conversations in the relationship, especially fights, take the same course of action over and over again. So you feel like you're stuck on a loop.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: It was Groundhog day.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: It's groundhog day.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: You know, you're waking up and Sunny and Chez playing on the radio and so that was the movie, but, yeah, but I 100% understand what you're saying is that it seems like nothing's changing, but you're not happy or you're not content or something's not right. And as a result, then that sort of helplessness comes across. So, you know that you. You are having the same conversations. The fight seem to center around the same key issues. And. And sometimes this can be on a year to year basis, not just a week to week or month to month basis. And, you know, you're not really doing anything. You don't have anything, I guess, within sight that help. There's no end in sight to it.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: Well, I guess the end would be, you know, what we talk about in terms of having a deliberate dream or goal or purpose, all of these things that are really important in giving you direction. And you're right. And we experienced that this when we lived close to here for about six years in the same apartment. And that six years, when I look back on it, is really a blur of time. In a lot of ways. This was a while ago. So this was almost a decade ago now. Eight years ago.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Yeah. We're focusing on the first decade of a relationship here, which is. Which is massive juxtaposition to the last ten years, where we're living the team life.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: This is when we weren't living the team life.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: We were not. And we managed to live for six years in this one home, really. It was Groundhog Day. I feel like we had the same fights, conversations, sense of frustration with one another, disillusionment. We loved each other, but we were very. Well, I was, and I think you were as well. We were a bit confused about how you can continue this way. What was the purpose of it all? And you do ask those bigger questions.
What is the purpose of all this?
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Oh, look, when I was in my twenties, I literally didn't know my ass from my elbow. Well, at the time I thought I did, of course, you know, and, you know, while we were quite maybe objectively successful in terms of what we achieved with finishing our degrees, getting new jobs, you know, living in an apartment in a nice suburb, all the things that should go tick, tick, tick, tick, that success. Well, congratulations, guys. There was a massive.
There was emptiness there and we were also living very siloed lives. We're very much. It's not like we were like, I don't give a stuff about you, but it was very much like, I'm the most important person here. I've got goals and dreams and hopes. I'm going to focus on them and we're going to live and love together. And it just wasn't enough, really.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: I think you're right. And I think when I think about it, those loops that we're talking about that kept playing over and over. The more they play over and over, the more you actually veer towards the silo because you find that the couple isn't like the team wasn't there. It wasn't giving us what we wanted out of it. And so our response was to try and get what we felt like we needed and wanted out of the individual life. And that's. And that's how you head down the silo path.
So that's it, guys. Those are our top five episodes. We hope you've really enjoyed the. The excerpts that we've given you today. They were the most popular episodes, so hopefully those excerpts carry. Carry a bit of weight for you guys. And if you haven't heard any of them in full before and they peaked your interest, please go back and have a listen to the full episode. We know you'll get a lot more out of it if the excerpt stood out to you. There's always a lot of layers in our episodes. We're quite deliberate in the level of content. We want to give. We want to give you guys a lot in each podcast, and we spend a lot of time researching for that purpose.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: I just think we've learned a lot about ourselves as well and our relationship, and it's been great to share the journey with you, our audience.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life relationship insights and conversations, head over to kimandroj.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: And if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy, and it'll make us really happy.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
