Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Ever catch yourself thinking, I really want to connect more with my partner, but we're just so busy right now. I'll focus on us when the kids are a little bit older. While it may seem totally reasonable to defer our happiness and connection to a future where circumstances are a little bit more ideal, this future often never arrives and we risk finding ourselves disconnected and dissatisfied. In today's episode, we explore the risks of postponing joy and satisfaction in our personal lives and in our relationships. We'll also discuss how adopting a growth mindset and how the happiness of pursuit can transform our approach to life and love.
[00:00:43] 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.
[00:00:50] 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.
[00:00:58] 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.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house stripping business, we've achieved some big dreams and most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:15] 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.
[00:01:25] 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.
Are you waiting to be happy? And if so, why?
Today we're talking about the risk of waiting to be happy. Or more accurately, waiting to pursue happiness.
Now, this is different from putting in the work for a future payoff like when we're saving money, doing exercise, or working on your relationship. What we are talking about is how waiting for the perfect future environment can actually prevent us from embracing joy today.
And you know, I think many of us do try, and I think many of us do tend to put off our happiness for an ideal future point in time where everything will be perfect. But the truth is that perfect moment might never happen. And Kim and I believe that is a huge risk to take to wait to be happy for the perfect future environment. Now, this also isn't about the notion of you could die tomorrow or live every day like it's your last, which is true, but this is more about recognizing that really all you have in your life is right now, this moment. So today we're gonna dive into why people wait for happiness, why couples wait for happiness, and how we can change our mindset so we can seize happiness in the present.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Got a bit philosophical there, didn't it?
[00:03:06] Speaker A: I tried.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: You could die tomorrow. It's not about that. It's really about. It's really about recognizing that now is all you really have. And I think, whilst that might sound heavy, it is reality. There is. We spend so much time being anxious about the future or sad about the past, regretful, whatever it is. But the reality is, reality is only right now. And I think once you're able to process that concept that we live in each singular moment, we start to drop away or let go of this idea that we live in a future moment somehow. And that's really at the crux of what we're saying here today, which is we live right now. That is us living. The future moment is an imagination. It's not real. And so waiting to get to that future moment, to seek out your happiness or pursue happiness, it's not real. It's not living right now. And there are huge benefits to starting today, to live the way that you want to live, move towards the happiness that you want to have. And we'll unpack, really, how happiness emerges, if you will, out of that desire to start living today, right now.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah. I recently heard that when you think about people who think about the past, a lot are unhappy. People who think about the future, a lot are anxious. And so it's about thinking about the now to find that contentment, to find that happiness.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Well, that's broadly how we define depression and anxiety. So depression lives in the past, anxiety lives in the future with your worries. And really, if you don't want to be in depression or anxiety, you need to live here.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not easy to do. Not only that is we think this has a big impact on couples as well.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. I think that's a great other point, is really, we're looking at this, obviously, through the couple lens today, through the relationship lens, and understanding that seeking happiness is something that, again, is done, best done today together, that. That start living that relationship you want today, start working on those things you want to work on together today, because that is living. That is where you will find happiness. And I guess we'll unpack that a little bit further as we get through the show.
All right, so what we see and hear a little bit from other couples is that in long term relationships, especially as people head into sort of their thirties and have kids and, you know, bed down and they've been married for a while, they often find themselves sitting in a sense of discomfort, a sense of stuckness. This is a real word we do here. I feel a bit stuck where I am, I not sure of where I'm going, not in control of where I'm going, not perhaps living a really deliberate life. And so people sort of tell us that they keep going, thinking that everything will be better in the future and that once they get to some certain time in the future, they'll be able to pursue the life they actually want.
However, what actually happens is that as time passes, they lose their connection and their happiness because they aren't pursuing it. They've put it on hold. And, you know, people find themselves saying things like, well, once the kids are in school and high school or, you know, once we have the house paid off or, you know, once we get that holiday home, then we'll really start enjoying ourselves, then we can, you know, be happy. But for now we just have to keep going and bed down.
It's a high risk mentality to take in to life that you wait for some future time to start living the way that you want to live and by postponing our happiness and not working on our relationship. Because part of pursuing what makes you happy together is certainly about working on your relationship. It's about building your connection and your bond.
If we're not doing that, then obviously the alternate happens, which is bit by bit we start to lose emotional connection and within that relationship we're really at risk of becoming more like co workers. Two people working to run a family, run a household, not necessarily finding intimacy, romance and purpose in their relationship at that point in time. And that anticipation of that perfect future environment just becomes a trap leading to really neglect of the present moment and the needs of the relationship right now.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: I think we've all been through this when we're like, okay, well, you know, once the kids are in junior school, once all the kids are in junior school, you know, or once all the kids are in high school or once we've moved into the suburb we want or paid off the mortgage or paid down the mortgage or paid off the cars or, you know, got the perfect holiday house, or once we've got time, then I can concentrate on us, then I can put the work into us and until then, you know, we're too busy and we're just going to have to keep going. But what happens is, over time, that. That connection that you had at the start, it starts to erode because you're not putting in the time. You're going, I'm going to put time into us in the future. I'm going to be happy in the future instead of making the change now. And I think that's where a lot of resentment can come from. I think that's where, you know, a lot of disconnection can come from. And, you know, people end up unhappy or divorced and, you know, hello, midlife crisis.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: I think one other thing that's important to point out there, rog, is, yep, it happens in everyday relationships all the time. But, you know, one of the things that we've experienced, and a lot of couples will have experienced in various situations is when life throws you a real curveball, which we talk about. And it actually gets very hard sometimes wading through the hardness to navigate, how to get back to finding. Being clear on what you're pursuing and what's meaningful to you can be very difficult. You can feel like, I have to wait till the hardness finishes. And even, you know, whether it's crisis or whether it's even just I'm waiting for the hardness of childhood, of my children and my young children to, you know, to pass by whatever it is.
We, as we always say, would be very clear in saying that in the hardness is when you need to double down most, because it is in the hardness that you're going to have the biggest drain on your relationship and the biggest strain on your relationship. So it is even more important. And that doesn't mean you need to be chasing down your biggest dreams and goals. That's not what we're saying. It's about being clear that you can still be pursuing what makes you happy in a way that works for you. You don't have to shut everything off waiting for that perfect future time.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: No, that's right, babe.
So there actually is some research out there as to why we do wait to be happy, because if we're all doing it, there must be a reason why. Well, Daniel Gilbert, who's a psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness, has actually extensively studied this phenomenon, and his research actually believes that this is a common cognitive bias. He calls this effective forecasting. He believes this leads people to believe that once they have the perfect environment, then their happiness will follow. But of course, Gilbert's findings suggest that people often overestimate the emotional impact of these future environments, and they think that will be much happier or in a better frame of mind to make the changes required to be happy once they've reached these conditions. But in reality, when the future arrives, it often doesn't turn out as they thought. It doesn't bring them that sense of happiness, it doesn't bring them that sense of readiness they anticipated. And what happens is they can then get stuck in this cycle, this cycle of well, oh, well, I thought I was going to be happy in the future. I thought I was going to be ready to make change in the future, but I'm not. So, well, I'll just keep waiting. And it becomes a cycle where not only does this happen again and again, but they miss out on these opportunities for happiness in the present. And I think some examples of this that we could all relate to are I'll wait to summer to try and get Fitzhe. And of course, well, three weeks before summer, you start dieting and hitting the gym. You know, I'll learn to play guitar when I have enough money to buy a new one. Well, you never end up having enough money to buy a guitar when you could have maybe borrowed one from a friend. I'll spend more time with my kids when I'm less busy at work. But the truth is, when have you been less busy at work? And this is almost the whole point of the cats in the cradle song. You know, you end up spending 20 to 30 years of your life working and you miss the most important years of your life, and that's the one spent with your little kids. And of course, I know we've all said this before, I'll wait until my partner and I are less busy before I tell them what I'm thinking or how I'm feeling. We're all busy. We're always busy. And you never end up telling them how you feel. And this is how resentment and a divide grows.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Oh, that last one's so good.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: I think it will hit close to home for a lot of people because.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: You think you're being considerate, right? You think they haven't got capacity. Right now I'm at my max. Let's just hold this in until we're at a better place in the future.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And sometimes that better place can not even be in a few years. It can be next month, next month, next month. And you get into the cycle and all of a sudden, twelve months, two years, three years have passed. And either resentments built and. Or there's a disconnect, there's a chasm, there's a gap between how you and your partner are feeling, and you've lost that emotional connection, and then it steamrolls over, or we don't make love anymore. Well, as we always say, emotional connections foreplays foreplay. And so it breeds all these issues.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: All right, so what else happens when we put off pursuing happiness today? Well, we actually put off growing as a couple, which is what we've really spoken about so far throughout, that the relationship suffers in terms of growth and development and connection. And you need to grow to feel connected as a couple. We can't stay stagnant. We all know stagnant is not an environment for growth and evolution and wellbeing. So renowned motivation researcher and a psychologist, Carol Dweck, suggests that waiting for the perfect moment often stems from what's actually called a fixed mindset. And this particular type of mindset is where individuals believe that their life circumstances are set in stone. And this sort of idea that life is happening to me, that's where it is. Like this life just happens. There's no, I don't have autonomy to change that. I accept that life is happening to me right now, and therefore I'm going to wait until life happens in a different way. So it paralyzes people into hoping and waiting for a better future, hoping and waiting for the future to come to them versus them to go to the future.
And people with this sort of mindset tend to see their current situation as the ultimate determinant of their future. Their future will happen no matter what because of what's happening now. And they believe they can't change right now and therefore change their future because life just continues to happen.
The other part of this one, this sort of mindset, is that when faced with difficulties, a fixed mindset person is more likely to avoid the challenges because they perceive these as threatening to themselves. So they just rather stay in a space where they have a sense of relying on the world to make change, relying on the world to do something for them, because they believe that's where the power lies. Power lies outside of them. And the converse to this, the other side of this is a growth mindset.
And a growth mindset is related to people who want to take action in the present, and they understand that they can improve and adapt as they go along. And obviously, a growth mindset person is pursuing happiness all the time. They're pursuing meaning. I mean, what is happiness? Pursuing meaningful things, things that are purposeful to them. And a growth mindset believes that abilities and life circumstances can be developed. If you don't have it now, you can grow it. And I think it's something that, you know, we definitely believe in. And we talked about before this, before we, we've come to record the show, we talked about the fact that in our life, certainly as carers and especially as a disability, is an unfolding disability. So some disabilities, you know, straight away what they're going to look like. But our daughter's disability has unfolded as she's grown and the level of her disability has become more apparent as she's evolved.
And there's certainly when things get harder rather than easier, the potential to say, it's out of my control because a lot of it is out of your control. And you can just paint your whole life in that way, this fixed mindset, it's out of my control.
Or you can say, what can I do?
What skills can I develop to help this situation?
Do I understand autism today? No. Could I understand it by the end of the year? Absolutely. Do I know where the best practitioners are today? Uh uh. Could I know that by the end of the year? For sure. And that's that difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
And something that sort of sprung to mind to me as we were talking about this before the show as well was, Roger, you've talked about before the concept of Kaizen, which is this continuous improvement that you never jump to the finish line, you move in the right direction. And I think that's the, the real difference between waiting for that future moment in time that will never come.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Yeah. So Kaizen's not about, oh, you've got to make this massive change to get your best bang for Buck. Kaizen's about starting to make little changes now, getting momentum and, you know, just like we say death by a thousand cuts, we're saying improvement by a thousand iterations and actions. And so by changing bit by bit, having the bravery to do it, you start to get motivation because you start to see the reward and you start to see the changes and you go, I can do this. And that's what a growth mindset is all about. I can do this. I can make change. And by making change now, I'm going to change the future.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: And another concept, as you're talking there, I was thinking of that we live by that's really important is MVP.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: And we mvp everything. What is our minimum viable product? Because if you set yourself up, if you want to be a growth mindset person, you have to believe that today's outcome does not have to be tomorrow's. I'm going to keep working and it'll be even better tomorrow. And then I'm going to keep working and it'll be better the day after that. And that's telling you with a minimum viable product, today doesn't have to be perfect because I'm going to keep working and it's going to get better tomorrow. So you're just doing what is literally what it states, which is the minimum to make what you, what you're producing viable. And we say MVP to everything. What we're doing in the household, what we're doing in business, especially when we get bogged down in the minutiae of.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Something and we're overwhelmed.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: And we're overwhelmed, we hover up and we say, what is our minimum viable product?
[00:20:15] Speaker A: What's the least we can do?
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: But to still make a change and all of a sudden we love to do this in the last term before school holidays. So what do we need to get done by the end of the year that's actually going to make a difference and the minimum, and we find that it becomes achievable as opposed to be overwhelming and we can't do this. This is too much. And those challenges just seem to be unachievable, unattainable.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: And sure enough, you look back after you've agreed on your MVP and you've done it, worked on it for two weeks, say, and you go, we have grown. We have moved in those two weeks thanks to that, to that minimum viable product and that continuous growth, well, it gives you empowerment.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: You know, you feel like, hey, I do have control. I can make change. And I think that's one of the reasons why a growth mindset is so important and so powerful.
Because really, when you, Kim and I strongly believe that when you start working on your dreams, when you start striving for happiness, you are actually living your dream life. And when you start working on your relationship, you are actually living the team life. And this is a concept that's commonly known as the happiness of pursuit as opposed to the pursuit of happiness. So instead of the distant goal being the purpose, it's the journey towards that goal. And so instead of waiting for the perfect future to make the changes required in your relationship, we suggest making those changes today. And, you know, for Kim and I, the first ten years of our relationship, we didn't know how to make changes. We didn't have the skill set and tools, and we also thought that the changes were too big to overcome. Now, whenever we have trouble the last ten to twelve years, whenever there's been a roadblock whenever we've had a rift, we've gone, what are the changes we can make today to start seeing a better future tomorrow? So just to close off the show, we do want to, I guess, set a little challenge for you. We do want to give you a little, a few tips and hints on what you can do to start those.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: Changes today and stop waiting for the perfect point in time, the perfect environment to pursue or actually, what did you just say? Not pursue your happiness. The happiness of pursuit to find. Stop waiting for the perfect moment to find happiness in the pursuit.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So what we suggest first is just start. And yes, it's hard, but you start small. You take that Kaizen mindset in the little changes. We suggest you and your partner identify two small changes you can make together in your lives.
Either, you know, taking something negative out or putting something positive in. Some suggestions are decide together to give up drinking for two weeks or reduce it to two nights per week. If you drink every night, start going for a walk together once a week for 30 minutes.
Start a new challenge together. Kim and I have decided to do an Iron man.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Half Iron man, half iron.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Mandy, small steps, but for you it might just be going for a run or taking up table tennis or, you know, picking up a hobby together, like golf or board games or something like that. Start a savings plan. Think about something you want to have in the future or don't even think about it. Just start putting some money aside and do it together.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Imagine waking up in a year and being like, what are we going to do with that awesome savings bucket we've got?
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Yeah, we've got all these dollary do's and we've got nothing. We don't, we don't know what to do with them. You'll find something, don't worry. And what Kim and I do, probably every three to six months, is we write up a list of all our nos. And this is a great one because you can just sit there and take control of your time and say, the next six months, the next year. This is what we're saying no to, so we can say yes to something else.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah, they're great little examples of ways you can just do something and pick what's purposeful to you. That's the whole point, is we're saying today, don't wait to start to find happiness in your relationship. Don't wait for it today, don't wait to start to do the things that bring you joy or the things that move you towards more contentment in your relationship and in your life. So pick something that's meaningful to you. Any one of those would have some meaning to different people in different ways. That would be. That would just spark something. When you heard that list and, you know, some of the pro tips we've got in terms of, you know, getting started in that, in those small changes, be honest, be honest with yourself, be honest with your partners, partner. Write it down, make it visible. Post it up on the fridge somewhere. That's going to keep you a little bit accountable and also give you a pat on the back when you look up and you go, whoa, I achieved that. I love to write things out and I love looking back and seeing them with it, with an old date on them and realizing, yeah, I hit on those things. I actually did what I wanted to do. It's a really good feeling. Go out for dinner or lunch and have a chat about it. Make it something fun and enjoyable, don't make it arduous and put a timeline against whatever you've set to do. So, yeah, rinse and repeat.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: All right, sweetie, what was your gold nugget for today?
[00:25:49] Speaker B: I think it's a really cool idea in general that starting today, it's not even the idea for me. It's like giving ourselves permission a lot of the time or people say permission. It's taking away the shoulds. That's what we love to do. Take away the shoulds of this world that do not benefit us, they do not benefit our relationship. Things should be perfect. Life should be easy. You know, I can't pursue happiness till someone else is happy first. None of this is real. They're just made up things. You can do anything. You can do literally anything. So take out the shoulds and just get started. That is all there is. That is how progress and growth work. So, yeah, take out the shoulds. What about you?
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Well, I think, you know, learning that it's actually a common phenomenon, that we think that the future will be a better time to start to make change or will be happiness in the future. The environment will be better and we'll just go and do it actually gives you the information to go well, actually. So this is about a change of mindset. So if I can move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and a growth mindset is actually about making small changes now and getting motivation, seeing results, and empowering yourself to make. To keep making changes. You know, I think. I think that is really empowering. I think it shows that we've all got it in us.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:27:24] 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.
[00:27:35] 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.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
