Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 243 | Couple Goals: Our Full Family Planning System

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

We’re back with our goal setting methods for 2025! Today we sat down and went over our individual, relational and family goals for this year and it feels GOOD to have a fresh perspective going into the new year! This is something Andrew and I do every single year and it’s been so beneficial to set tangible goals for ourselves and re-evaluate as the year goes on. We would love for you to set your own goals and we’ve provided our free template below to help you get started. Let us know how it goes! Love you guys! Shawn and Andrew Download our FREE Goal Setting Method ▶ https://www.familymade.com/vision-setting Subscribe to our newsletter ▶ https://www.familymade.com/newsletter Follow our podcast Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/shawnandandrewpods/ Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Shop My LTK Page ▶ https://www.shopltk.com/explore/shawnjohnson Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to a couple things. We're Sean and Andrew. We're here because I posted a casual picture on Instagram yesterday. And you all freaked out and you were like, please explain. And the thing I posted was a picture saying we did our annual family goals and how life changing it's been for us. We've done it for seven years. And you guys were like, please tell us everything.

So we've done an episode on this previously. but we're going to revamp things since we're a couple more years into this thing like seven we also have a name for it i didn't like the name together targets i don't like that okay we're also working on a name we're you going for this alliteration yes i love together target okay if you have a name for this please let us know but uh this is something that has now been shared thousands of times and it's really fun. It's almost one of the things we're known for. Yeah. I know your Olympic gold medal. It was great, Sean. You're dancing with the stars accolades was fine. But this goal setting method, I think is going to be your legacy. We actually kind of mine. You mean ours? Yeah.

Yeah. We actually kind of stumbled into this. And the amount of friends now of ours who do this who are like constantly texting us around the New Year, they're like, oh, can you send us the template again? Can we do that? Whatever has been really cool. And, All I can say, I mean, we're going to talk for an hour, so it's not all I can say. But is seven years ago, I will never forget, we were living in Washington, Ashburn, Virginia. We were living in the basement of some of our best friends' house. You were playing in the NFL. We had a phenomenal life.

Like, it was a lot of fun. We were doing really cool things. It was randomly fun. It was randomly fun. But we said during the New Year, we said, let's go. do some like goal setting we didn't know what that would look like or how to do it but we just kind of sat down we were at a coffee shop for an entire day pretty much and at the end of it we looked and shared each other's like goals that we had each separately written down through like this process that we do

and it was wild to see that both of us wrote down this vision of a life that was drastically different than what we were living and it was shocking to both of us we were like oh as a married couple our vision has grown closer together and is more aligned, which is so much fun. And when I think about marriage as a team, that's kind of what you're going for, right? It is to have an objective that you're both working towards. Yes. One of the things we want to do this year is start all of our podcasts with comments and feedback from the audience. And today we're going to be doing that live.

So we have Kay with us who says, love your videos from Indiana. go Hoosiers I'm an Indiana boy myself Jordan says not related but Sean your hard work is showing and you look incredible I agree with her thank you Jordan and then Hannah asks is this going to be posted so I can rewatch later yes it will be it will be on our podcast channel and look a little better yes yeah hopefully so we have

have you guys ever seen our studio in here we'll show we'll maybe do a tour of our studio as a everyone just slightly panicked I saw their face go please don't move you're on camera we have done this now for seven years and we did our goals for 2025 just yesterday yes and i cannot tell you the joy it brought me to see how sean and i's vision for our life has not only become clear but as a married couple we've been married married now for almost nine years as a married couple our vision has grown closer together and is more aligned which is so much fun and when I think about marriage as a team that's kind of what you're

going for right is to have an objective that you're both working towards yes so let me give you a little bit of history first seven years ago we were living in ashburn virginia in the basement of some of our best friends their house andrew is playing for the NFL we had a very fun life we were doing things very random but fun we had good jobs um we were making decent money we were traveling we were doing a lot of things that people would look at and say that's a great life and we looked at our life and we're like we have a great life but we felt called that year around new years to go to a coffee shop and do some goal setting um i don't know what prompted us to do this i honestly don't remember where our minds were at that called for this but i remember we sat down in this coffee shop

for almost an entire day and we hand wrote out on pieces of paper and pencil and pen different goals and we had this process that we kind of implemented back then which we'll walk you through and by the end of that day

we shared with each other our individual goals because you do them separate and then you share them and it was fascinating to both of us for both of us to look at each other's goals and notice that everything we each individually wrote down looked drastically different than the life we were living

and it was the first time we saw each other and we were like oh i didn't know you wanted to do this i didn't know that was a dream of yours or a goal of yours i didn't know you wanted to live in this place i didn't know like we truly didn't know a lot of the stuff about each other and we didn't know that we were both discontent with the amazing life we were living yeah I think this was sparked by and inspired by us realizing that you had just completed your transition out of sport. Yep. Meaning you took pretty much four or five years to redefine and refine yourself after gymnastics. And I became very aware that that transition was about to happen for me.

I had just signed with the Redskins. Yes, that was really fun. It was a dream come true. But I realized that, okay, I had just achieved. this lifelong dream and I had nothing that I had dreamed of beyond that. And then I also realized I'm not going to be playing in the NFL very long and I should recalibrate what my goals are so that I'm more enabled to make the transition when that time does come.

It's so fun to, an example from yesterday is there's a couple different aspects to this process that we've stumbled into and built and we've revised this and revisited it year after year after year, we'll link our shareable document down below in the description. But one thing is, as Sean said, when you go through each other's dreams,

you learn about each other in such a unique, beautiful way. So that's like a derivative side effect. And you learn how to support each other. Yes. Because what would have otherwise seemed random like oh Andrew is going to the music studio today to record something that's random I in weird why would I support that when you can see in a grander scale oh that's a part of his dream or a part of his goals it makes it easier to be like a supportive spouse yeah so that's one one

side effect of doing this process another is just having the space to stop and reflect on as many areas and aspects of your life as possible for me is always so fun and then as I create these yearly benchmarks of where we were and health-wise financially family who's learning what at what time what Sean and I went through this year it's really fun to see the progress and see the trend of where you're going also yesterday we're going through our goals and there was a couple specific things that we had said we wanted to do with the kids and so it creates this dynamic where you write this thing down and thus it's more top of mind in doing that secondarily you get something to anticipate or look forward to and then lastly when

you do take time to stop and reflect it is like this really amazing fun thing of like, oh my gosh, we actually did it. And there's this principle called the Hawthorne effect, which says that what is observed and focused tends to change or improve. And you'll hear Sean and I are big on like writing these goals down. I know people do goals differently. This is how we do it. But we're huge on documenting everything. And now we have this Google Doc that's about 60 pages long that has our goals from 2018 on and now we can look back and see what we had written down in certain phase of the life that then like you you're able to reflect and remember and celebrate or

laugh at and say remember when you really wanted to to build that business or remember when you really wanted to take that trip and it was terrible because we actually did it or whatever it is like that when you measure and observe something it really does make a difference So write it down, is what I'm saying. It's been really cool. Okay. I feel like you and I, there are so many things that I want to like share and explain because this has become so routine to us.

First, let's see if I can remember all of my thoughts, is something that has been really cool to see about having all these documents from seven years together. A big difference. I always tell people it was absolutely life-changing for us seven years ago, and it is every year. because seven years ago, when we looked at each other's goals and we looked at our life, everything was like to a certain extent in chaos. It was very random.

It was purposeless because there wasn't like a common path we were both taking to get to an end destination, if that makes sense. So our goals looked very different than life we were living. Fast forward seven years now of doing this. It's really fun to sit down every year and be like, oh my gosh. Like last year we had this vision for our life and where we actually actually, lived it and so seven years ago when we sat down for the first time we changed every aspect of our life now we're finessing things and when we go back to the year before and we're like oh we had the goal to do this we did it do you want to do it again it's like oh yeah I actually do but I want to add a

little bit more or take away a little bit less or that was a little too much now we're like finessing our dream life together which is actually really cool and I think what's what's cool about it is I think there's a difference between like doing life day in and day out and just like making choices on the go impulsively or without direction. I think you can lead, live a great life that way, but not meaningful. And I think there's a difference between doing life and like living life with a purpose. And I feel like for us after that first year of like figuring out what our dreams are together, together in every category of life, it got rid of so much noise for us that we were able to make

decisions so much easier as a couple and a family. So we would have an opportunity come its way for a new job or for travel or a place to live. And it was like, that sounds really fun. And before we did our goals, we probably would have said yes. But now that we've done our goals and we know where we want to end up, it actually doesn't align with anything that we have written down. So that doesn't make sense for our family. Yeah. And so in some way, it created boundaries for us to actually like create the life that we want. Andy Stanley has a quote that says everyone ends up somewhere in life. Some people end up there on purpose. Yeah. And it is worth noting that Sean and I approached this very much from a Christian biblical standpoint where it's like,

Like, I think we're here for a purpose, which I think is an important delineation. And so finding that purpose and then doing that purpose day to day is kind of what we're shooting for. And you'll notice that as we get into the process. That is one thing that has changed since we last recorded an episode is we did create a document that's shareable that you can find in the description. It kind of walks you through. We're pretty much going to walk through this document and hopefully updated and change it as we go on. I will say that that feeling of we said we were going to do something we actually did it is I think one of the most inspirational motivational things because when you say oh I said I want to do this thing

and I accomplished it maybe I can accomplish anything and then the next level of that is actually I don't want to accomplish just any random thing I want to accomplish this specific thing that makes me feel like I'm in the sweet zone I'm in the pocket I'm like doing what I'm here to do I'm in my calling, however you want to phrase that. It's like, you know, there's this principle of the hedgehog effect and good to great. It's a good book. He says, what are you good at? What are you passionate about and what is there a need for?

And it's like, when you're in that zone, man, it's beautiful. Carry on. Another thing that is really cool about this year, Andrew is literally clapping in the middle of the coffee shop and like celebrating because we had written down. some goals for our kids just like milestones that we wanted to work on whether it was like reading for drew or identifying letters and you don't realize within a year that things that start feeling so routine and so normal actually are these massive milestone events that have happened and you don't even realize it when you are able to zoom out once a year and look back and reflect on where you were a year ago and where you are now things

are so much grander than they actually feel. So we had one of the little goals we had written down for our kids was for Christmas a year ago both Drew and Jack got motorcycles. And a goal we had for them was to learn how to ride their motorcycles because they were so excited.

And when we read that yesterday, we were like, what? Because it feels so normal now in our life for them. They're so proficient on their motorcycles that it never even occurred to me that this was the year they learned how to ride them. Yeah.

And being able to like celebrate that for a second and realize how far they've come or Jet went through four huge milestones this year with a big boy bed, taking away his passy, getting potty trained and like learning how to ride as a motorcycle. That was huge. Yeah. It really provides a canvas to increase your appreciation of everything that's happened. And like if you're able to walk away from that reflective period with a little more gratitude or awe and wonder towards life,

then that's a huge win. So let's dive into this document a little more specifically if you're ready for it. I think so. And we also have a document, we have questions coming in that we'll try to answer intermittently. But one thing to note is that

the whole method is kind of rooted in historical data and gathering information from all the different aspects and categories that we're going to go over to. today. But it's a pretty structured and reflective process to help understand where you've been and then give you metrics to aim towards in the future as well. So detailed goal planning like this is important because I think it expands on specific areas and it allows you to apply things like family mission statements, traditions, budgeting, personal development on a more

practical day-to-day basis and then setting concrete goals in any aspect of life is I think really helpful to have something to shoot for when you wake up in the morning or you stop and do have that moment of reflection. Do we set goals with the kids involved now too? So this was actually yes but let me put an asterisk there so up until this year when let me back up for a second when we were just doing it and it was and I married couple there was one year that we put within our goals we wanted to get pregnant and we wanted to have kids so for that year our goal was to get pregnant that has then transitioned into there was one year last year where we said we wanted to have bear and we wanted to go through the postpartum

process and I detailed what I wanted postpartum to look like. Now that we have kids that are five, three and one, we do, we have added a category for kids and we have done up until this year milestone goals for them. So like Drew was identifying letters and numbers or taking away passie or potty training or a big boy bed or a big girl bed. There are all these things that we had goals for learn how to ride a bike. Bear a goal for him was to walk. But this is the first year that we actually caught ourselves in writing goals for Drew and Jet. We didn't know how to voice them because it now has turned into we can't make goals for them when it comes to like hobbies. So Drew loves ice skating.

I didn't know how to write a goal for her because I'm like, what if she doesn't like it anymore? And what if she wants to quit? So now we are getting into a phase where we will now include them. and make sure we're fostering their goals that they specifically want for themselves and we're not like putting that on them. And we did ask them this year for the first time do you have any goals for the year?

Which is a big concept for them to, yeah. One of the answers was we want snow. Yeah. So I'm excited for when they're able to grasp the concept of like setting a vision for your life. But we do foresee them being a part of us. Yeah. And another question is, do you ever think about changing the way you do goals? No. It has worked so beautifully for us. I think it will evolve as we add in our kids because we will have our own and then we'll have to do a goal setting with our kids. But no. This works perfectly for us.

I think it'll be lightly changed. This year, we did talk to the kids about what we were spending our day doing and all the fun things that we were going to try to dream up. to do together as a family all the things we wanted out of out of our family for that year and so kind of including them in the conversation is the stage we're at now just letting them know that we're doing this type of stuff to hopefully condition them for for later another question before we dive into the process it someone asked do you feel overwhelmed doing goals for yourself together parents and for the kids it feels overwhelming before you dive in because you're like how how do I write down and change my life

and like do all these things it can feel very overwhelming but that's why I love our process and kudos to us like pat on the back for how we figured this out but we try to simplify the process enough to where it declutters your brain

and you can actually focus on like the little things and write them out and you know get it all out on paper yeah and I also want to say this is not the best way to do goals. This is just the way that has best worked for us. And so whether you're doing this or any other method, please actually just take time to reflect and to set a plan for your life and where you might want it to go. Obviously, there's going to be tons of deviation from that. But I think just doing this in any form is extremely helpful. And Sean and I's foundation for this and how this kind of came about is we've done so many executive coaching, counseling, workshop type stuff that help break down these ambiguous, large topics that do feel overwhelming and like super intangible and how do you even go about adjusting this, that we've kind of come up with a framework for how to break this down.

So what is the method? Yeah. Let's talk about what is needed to do this first and foremost. Also, I hope it goes without saying, like, this is what has worked for our family. We're giving you exactly what we do. You can tailor it to your family. If you're single, if you're married, if you have kids, if you're an expecting mother, if, like, whatever your situation, just tailor it to you.

But we'll give you, like, the idea of how we do it. That's right. First thing you need is about a half a day. So on the document, we have three to four hours. I really think five to six would be better. We do about six, but that includes we go to a coffee shop. we go somewhere out of the house, we order food, we get like really comfy in our place and like take the time.

We take breaks if we need. So like we do five to six hours. Yeah. And the first time you do this, maybe you'll need more just because you're kind of building the framework and building the metrics, if you will, or the aspects that you're focusing on. But of that time period, about an hour and a half will be spent reviewing the past year. which we did not do the very first time because we had not

like written anything down for the past year so it was more spending that hour and a half or however long you need figuring out what your categories are what you want to tackle yeah and we have given you starter pack yes uh categories in the document but spend a certain amount of time reflecting we'll show you how we do this and then the rest of the time will be spent going through category by category to set a vision. We think that it's super helpful to have a unique environment to be in, like a different space.

So we try not to do this at home. We've done it at home one time. That was right after we had our third kid. We were pretty bedridden after that. But I would say the second thing you need, aside from time, is a location to go to. I think mentally, psychologically, it puts you in a different headspace than if you're on the couch at home. Makes you feel focused. That's right.

Third, you'll need a clock, a timer. Feel free to use your phone, but we set five-minute timers. Once we've completed the reflection period and we're ready to move forward to setting the vision for each category, we give ourselves a five-minute time limit to do that, which I think is important. And we can explain that more as we go through, but we think it's important because if it's ambiguous if it's like never ending you can get very lost and well what direction do I go and how detailed and how granular and like you can get very overwhelmed if you have like a half hour per for every category however long you want whereas you know like the analogy of like

if you can't choose between one thing or another they say flip a coin because in the air you start wishing for one thing you'll know what you really want yeah so I feel like when you set the timer for five minutes for each category, the things that are really important start to jump out. Yeah. One question we get is how do you keep this motivational

versus pressurizing? And I think for us, we're not setting these insanely far off goals, right? Like we see where we've been. That's why the historical accumulation of data matters. And then based off of that,

we come up with like a realistic, extrapolation of that so for us it's like a it's not pressure full at all it's like it's really no this is achievable we did we did this last year we can do this this year if we do x y and z you know and you can you can look back each year and choose to take the mindset of like oh i didn't achieve that or we came short or whatever but what we have learned since we've now done it for seven years is like there are things that we'll write down whether it's like finances or how many date nights or like whatever where we're way off like base

and so the next year we'll come back and we'll be like whoa we actually way overshot that or undershot that and that didn't work out for us so we adjust it the next year so you use it as like you're finessing things it's not like an end point yeah it's more gathering information and then trying to make informed decisions based off of that

we're not like punishing ourselves if we don't hit certain things. So we have about a half day of time is the first thing we need. A different location is a second, a clock, or timer is a third. And then either a piece of paper or we do it on a computer. That's right, because we're going to be writing all of these things down. And what we write down is the historical metric of the thing we're measuring. the goal of what we're then trying to achieve based off of that

and then different areas of growth associated with that. The benefit of writing this down is I've got to see Sean's vision, I get to see my vision, and then we have a conversation and a compromise results after that, which is again really fun, I think really important. It kind of builds as a habit of having crucial conversations,

getting on the same page and then how much power is there when you're actually aligned with the goal that you say, okay, we both have said we want to do this, let's go for it. And we allow space within our goals and our life to be different. So one of our favorite things

about doing the goal setting is since we write on separate pieces of paper or on separate documents, I get so excited to see what he's written down because it teaches me so much about him and the way his brain works and what he's envisioning for the next year and the goals he has for himself. And then if our goals in some mutual category, so like we work together, so for our business, if our goals are drastically different, it's actually really fun to then

come together and say, okay, you have way different goals for our business than I do. Let's figure out how we can like compromise and blend this together so that we both feel driven and inspired to like work yeah but we also have categories where personal is what we deem it where there's strictly personal goals that I can help support him in and he can help support me in that there are like there is no compromising for if that makes sense or needed for and these conversations open the door for questions like oh well why are we on different pages right and then maybe that leads to the inside of, you know what, Sean really just wants to be at home with the kids instead of working, right? And then now I know that as opposed to that conversation never

happening and we show up to work and she's half there, half not. So it just is really great in that sense. Lastly, you need to pray about the goals that you're about to set because Sean and I, we try to set the heights and the best goals. And I think that's impossible to do with without that aspect of humility or seeking God's grace or, you know, input in this. And so we do think having that moment to stop and pray and to welcome in the highest and best there is, is really important.

So let's break down what the categories are. We have our life categorized into 12 different buckets. those are finances, travel, family, friends, marriage, health and fitness, philanthropy, home, faith, business, personal, and kids. Now, let me just, the way my brain works very type A, let me explain how we do this when it comes to the clock and the time management. So say you're sitting down in a coffee shop, you each have your pieces of paper, you each have your document pulled up on your computer. I would write down or we would write down 2025 goal setting, Sean Andrew, they're separate. We would write down finances and we would get ready and we'd say, okay, are you ready to start? Yes.

Are you ready to start? Yes. I would then start a clock for five minutes. Now, we each separately, not talking to each other, not looking at what each other write down, we write down our goals for finances. and you guys however you want to dissect that you can but is there something you want to change do you want to change your spending habits do you want to work on an organizational system do you have a goal of how much you want to make in a year do you like whatever pertains or relates to finances to you you write down and you use the five minutes something ander and i do is if we both are kind of

like sitting there looking at each other and it's been two minutes and we're like well i'm done are you done yeah yeah then we'll stop the clock and we move on to the next one but the five minutes is just kind of a cap it's kind of like to get it all out not obsessed not overthink just get out the big things because you will revisit it when you're done with all 12 and start sharing and like going over them that's right each of the 12 categories that we have can be broken down into subcategories too so um for example finances maybe it's income expenses one of ours was like from a high level organization standpoint is there any like system changes we need to make are there any software or apps we need to look at and that's helpful

health and fitness maybe it's broken down into nutrition and exercise and then something like friends would be like we've almost broken it down into different uh we have like a men's group right and that's something that we're highly committed to that we will be at every other week. And then there's other friends where it's like, yeah, we want to do double dates, X, Y, Z. If you don't mind, I think we should go through our 12 categories and kind of give these examples

that we've written down. So you guys understand on, like, how detailed do we go? So with finances we explained, we will write down income and how much we want to save, how much we want to invest. How much we want to give? How much we want to give. anything like that like all of our details so our five minutes are finished we say okay travel you ready

you ready press start go travel it's kind of like what trips do we want to take who do we want to go on the trips with how like how much time do we want to spend away from home where do you want to go how much money do we want to spend or save for travel um do we want to plan a vacation just us like we go into detail on anything that pertains to travel. And this year, it was so fun to go back through our previous year during our time of reflection. We wrote down all the different places that we went. So we went to London, Paris, and Italy for the Olympics.

We went to Charleston for a family vacation. And we just kind of wrote the towns out or the cities out that we went. We went to Indianapolis seven times. And we wrote down when we did that. But that process of just like sparking. the memories of oh my gosh that was so much i can't believe we did all this in a year oh my gosh that's crazy it then also leads to you know i think going to indianapolis seven times was maybe slightly too many so maybe maybe when we set next year's goals let's just put it at five or so and something that

we have experienced as a family and something why it's really important for us to have like a travel section is we'll have friends who are like do you want to go take your kids to a mountain retreat somewhere like go camping um this summer and they'll start planning their year out in january and we'll be like yeah that sounds like fun but if we don't have if we haven't done this first where we've prioritized i want a trip with my parents i want a trip with your extended family we want a family reunion. We go see the entire East family every Labor Day. We go to the Indy 500. Like if we haven't already prioritized those, a lot of times we can overbook ourselves to where the things that really mattered to us, then get pushed behind the scenes. And so let me just read you our goals. This is

from our private doc that you won't find. For this year for travel, we literally wrote down we want one couple's trip with other friends. I want one boy's trip. Sean wants one girl's trip. We want one solo trip together, just her and I, so like a marriage getaway, six times going to Indy. We want to go on two trips that are for charitable causes. So we do a special forces charitable trust trip, and we'll be in New York City for this American Heart Association thing. So some of these we know will happen, like those two charitable trips we know will be booked. some other ones like the solo trip with Sean we have ideas on where we want to go but it's not been booked yet

so we'll literally write down though to Sean's point we want one trip with extended family one trip together and like that's that's the metric that we're using yes okay moving on our third category we do family family is a little bit more vague for us but we always put the category in here this is like what do we want the family dynamic in our house hold to look like. So some of our goals were like we want our kids to be really close with their cousins, their nana, their me, me, and their poppy this year. What does that look like?

So we'll say every Friday we're going to do a family dinner with my parents where we go to their house or they come to our house. Once a month we see our cousins or we see nana. So we start building this like family dynamic that we want and what it means for our family's values to like be executed. within our year. I think that's a great example of taking this vague feeling of or this vague desire of we want our kids to be close with their cousins and then backtracking that into, okay, well, if they saw their cousins seven times last year, did that foster that growth or did that contribute to that growth or do we need more?

And then when we say seven times, it's like, well, we need more, so let's make it not seven times, seeing cousins like we can nine times and and then it puts a tangible metric and number to that feeling which then is like I don't know there's something you could do about it almost at that point some other goals that we've written down in family before is like how many families like how many dinners a week do we want all five of us around the dinner table um we do dates with our kids so like I take it's like a special time where like me and drew will just go out and get ice cream or me and Jett. We write how many dates we want with each kid.

How many times we want to go to church together as a family, which then reminds me that some of the goals we set for the category will overlap and spill into other categories as well. But that's okay. Don't overthink it. Yeah. And we write them down in both categories because it's helpful to see. Next category is friends.

Andrew kind of talked about this, whether it's women's group or a men's group or how many double dates do you want to go on throughout the year what friends do you want to be closer with are there any friendships or relationships within your circle that maybe aren't healthy that you should take a step back from this year um we always do we've started this cadence last year we call it like our friday saturday sunday um kind of routine where every friday we do like a grill like a grill out last year it was pizza and a movie but like we have an open Open door policy where our friends can come over with their kids and we just kind of serve dinner and we hang out. Saturday, we do pizza nights.

Same thing. Open door policy, family friends, kids are invited. And then Sunday, we always try to have like a very calm church day. So church, no extracurriculars, we're just at home, no technology, just being being still. Other things that could go in this category is do you want to take any trips with friends? Yep. is that going to be double date or is it going to be with the whole family is kind of how you could zoom in on that a little bit more do you want to host things like friends giving so we said

host of friends giving um do you want to take any boys trips etc but you know that book the secret or that concept the secret of like oh if you put it out into the atmosphere it happens i don't really subscribe to that at all but it is interesting to write down something like we want to host of friends giving it then really does become more of a conversation which then makes it more of a reality and then maybe you go and say hey we want a house of Friends Giving this year to your buddy and then they're like sweet we're in

and then all of a sudden you put it on the schedule and it's actually a real thing as opposed to like one of the the Friends trip made me think of this is whether you have friends who invite you on trips or who don't it's like we get invited on trips and it's like yeah I would love to do that but then having a tangible number of now we're going to go on two friends trip and actually

we've already booked them now at this point since we've been doing this for so long we book out a little longer and it just helps you one again make it an actuality and make it a reality but two know how to prioritize those different things as you actually put them on your calendar and this is also within every category things like this will pop up but for us one year one of us wrote I want to host a monthly game night at our house and I don't want to say it took one of us by surprise but you can have like these brand new ideas and concepts come to life within your goals that neither of you had ever really talked about before or really planned about and so we started doing monthly game nights because of one of our goal settings and we're like oh okay

what does that look like and so within our planning we were like the first Friday of every month we are going to allot within our financial budget a certain amount of money for the first Friday of every month to host friends and to build a community so that was a goal we had

which then triggered over into the finance thing where it's like hey here's our tangible monthly budget that we're going to contribute for social events and game nights so it really just kind of helps you organize your whole life within a year next category we do is marriage we talk about focusing on our marriage so for us goals will look like

how many date nights do we want to do in a year how many trips just us do we want to how many marriage counseling sessions do we want to do are there any like goals as far as praying for each other oh we write we want to do devotionals every morning and have coffee together i mean yeah and so yeah we've said divos five times a week right we're not we're not reading the devos and then going to make an tally mark anywhere you kind of have a rough understanding though of how often you actually do do those things and that's been really helpful this category makes me think of kind of the softer elements that will include in our written down goals so not everything not everything that we write in the

document will be a metric. This year, we wrote, we want to work on being better teammates and cheerleaders of each other. That's something that doesn't, we haven't figured out how to quantify yet. Maybe it's better not to, but it is a, it's still kind of a North Star that helps guide. But there's also something to writing it down. Yes. And reading it out to one another where you're like, you know what, I actually want to focus on being a better cheerleader for you this year. I wrote that down this year. I said, I internalize, like internally, I know I am your biggest cheerleader. I said, but this year I actually want you to feel it. It was a hard year postpartum with another baby and all these things. And I said, that was one of my goals, is to be a better spouse this year.

And it is worth saying that all these categories, maybe there's more categories we could add, but based off the many conversations we've had with counselors, people we admire, people that are in the self-health productivity world. These aspects of life really do lead to a joyful life if executed intentionally and well. So let us know if we're missing anything. But when I think of financial health and not being stressed out that something's around the corner and going to come up and bite you, or traveling is something. Like I think a Carl Pillar's book, 30 Lessons on Living, like Travel, Travel,

with something, an aspect of life that the older generation really valued. Friendships, obviously, having a healthy friendship group and friend group is crucial. Having healthy marriage is going to affect your day-to-day enjoyment of life. Health and fitness, philanthropy is its own section because giving back is such a crucial part to building meaningful community. Home, faith. We'll go through these. business personal and kids but anyway it's like we view this as a rather comprehensive list of

categories but i digress um something else there was a question that came through on a dm yesterday saying how do i tell my spouse that it's not all about money because his his thinking is i'm trying to remember it was basically like as soon as we have this amount of money it will fix the rest of the problems and I actually remember one year where we had done one of our best years financially and we looked back at our goal settings and said you know what I don't want to make that much money next year because we sacrificed time with the kids we sacrificed time with each other we sacrificed time with our family because we were so driven to make that number that all these other like categories where we wrote down goals we didn't succeed in

reaching our goals because we overprioritized that so I think in talking to your spouse and looking at the full um picture that's why we do so many categories like what do we want our full life to look like money doesn't fix that but like it's an aspect of it yeah it's more of a holistic holistic approach to life and there's a a book called Die Was Zero, which talks about how people make these bucket lists in life. And by the time they're 60 or 70 years old and they have retirement and all the money and now they want to start traveling where they sacrifice that before, you don't enjoy it as much at that age, right?

So the whole thesis is sprinkle those big moments of travel or whatever the thing is throughout your life during the time that you can enjoy the most. So like right now, why it is a huge cost to travel with these little kids and, you know, buy a two-year-old, a airplane seat. It's like, gosh, that feels unnecessary. But you're like, no, we're going to enjoy this in a way that we otherwise couldn't later on down the road. So why wait? It's like some things are worth the cost. Right. And when you look at life from a more holistic standpoint, you start to see that. I do want to ask, sorry. Someone asked, You, do you ever feel overwhelmed as a mother trying to set goals when life feels so unpredictable?

Yes and no. My goals have looked very, very different than Andrew's goals in many of these topics and categories throughout the past five years because of kids. But it's actually been really cool because Andrew's been able to support me better as a mother because of, because of writing things down. So I was just going to say in the next topic of health and fitness or category, the past five years have been really interesting because for me, health and fitness has looked a lot different than Andrew. Within that, I've written things like I wanted to get pregnant or I wanted to have a healthy

pregnancy or I wanted to have a safe delivery. I will put, you know, goals like I have a goal not to get gestational diabetes. or if it's within a year where I'll be postpartum, I've actually written within the health and fitness side of, I want to have a healthy postpartum. Here's kind of what I want that plan to look like. Here are some benchmarks that I want you to keep me accountable for. And I'm not talking about weight. I'm not talking about bouncing back.

I'm talking about like, I want you to check in with me after two weeks to make sure I'm not edging towards postpartum depression or. I try not to get overwhelmed in the mom side of it. I try to literally like write out attainable goals that should reflect where we are in life, not like, I don't know, be unrealistic. It is important to note that while this is a very rigid, structured system, we have a ton of flexibility with it. So I think we aim very specifically,

but we understand that we're going to need to be very flexible in the day-to-day. Here's one comment that says, my husband and I use your PDF and podcast for our 2025 goal setting, and it's been a game changer. Yay. Love to hear that. Another question in common is, I'm a huge goal setter, but my partner isn't.

How can we navigate that? I would say it would be a really tough situation if you went to your partner and said, hey, I came up with all these goals or I have all these things I want to talk to you about and walk through with you, and they said no. Yeah. I think that'd be tough. Yeah.

And probably shed some light on the relationship. But I think viewing it more as a, hey, let's dream together or let's... You're a family. Let's try to get on the same page with these things. There's different ways to approach it. Okay. I'm going to skim through the last five

because I feel like you guys have gotten to just, of what we're doing. But our last five or six categories are philanthropy. We usually try to write out which charities we want to donate to that year, how much we want to donate. Do we want to host any events? Do we want to attend? We said one local serving day as a family, one local day with our friend group, and

then one international trip that we take as a family. So that was kind of the metric we did there. do we want to visit the children's hospital at all, do things like this? And again, we'll put a number to how many visits we'd like to make that really makes it attainable. We added a category one year for home. And that was because we had talked about how significant the home was to me. So we wanted to make sure we had that shared, I guess, understanding or passion. and so our category with home is like for us in the past years it's been to finish a nursery

to find a place for a home gym hang curtains yeah you know little things but just making the home reflect our lifestyle which going back to the question of how do I make it not all about money for my husband yeah for me when we added that category it was so helpful to have pretty much you set your own boundaries yeah kind of right we would have a conversation and then boundaries would be established and so that way as the year progresses we have this as a reference point and an anchor point where it's like no you said you only wanted to add the curtains and do the garden but now you're trying to do x y and z and it's like it gives you uh a more friendly way to rein things back as a husband i found and

to celebrate it when it happens. If you're both agreeing, you're going to start a home garden January 1st or the beginning of January, and it comes about in June, it's more, like, you're ready for it. Yeah. I don't know. Ninth category is faith. This is like how many times we want to go to church, devotionals. One year, we said we both wanted to join a women's Bible study or a men's Bible study.

Just how to, we said we wanted to find a new church one year. and get set up with a new church community. How much do you want to donate to church? Again, that'll trickle over into the philanthropy. How many times you want to volunteer? We view that in this category as well. And then for me, it was like how many times a week am I going to listen to sermons versus the Bible

versus books by pastors, things like this? Next category for us is business. This one looks different for us since we run a business together. But I think so many side hustles are so, ubiquitous now and popular that I think you know you can have your normal day-to-day job and then your side hustle or you know maybe you're selling sourdough loaves on the side things like this but I also think this is a place where you guys can say like oh I want a new job maybe your spouse doesn't

know that yeah maybe you want to work for a promotion or whatever it is um for us our business category looks like what do we want our specific business together to look like and what do we want to change. And this was year to year, the emphasis on different categories will change. So 2024 was a big year for business for us as far as we wanted to put a lot of focus on that category by pairing things back and doing less, right? Because we had these kids at young ages. At that time, we were struggling through the early months of a newborn. And so what we did last year it took a lot of our focus was went project by project literally and tied income and revenue to those specific projects and then we said okay these things take the most effort and they're

getting the least amount of return so let's cut these right and it just helped give visibility to what we're doing and what we're actually spending time on because you know just like anybody else we'll find ourselves mindlessly scrolling on instagram or we'll have an idea that we get excited about and we'll start it and the next thing you know we're spending in order amounts of time on it and is it actually paying any dividends it's like yeah last year was big for us to spend a lot of time reflecting and adjusting these things this year it was it was way less of a focus for us um last two personal personal is always fun and random and weird this is like do you want to start a new hobby for me this year i wrote i wanted to attend cooking classes

and I wrote a quantity. I said maybe a cooking class quarterly. I wanted to start sourdough. Last year I wrote I wanted to get tattoos. I wanted to get double piercing in my ears. It can be very strange and weird, but it's just these fun little quirky things that you might not have prioritized for yourself

that you can prioritize now. How many books do you want to read? Do you want to watch a new TV show? And just like a monthly checkups, this conversation time has become a space where we can push back or give input in different ways. So, like, we had a big tattoo discussion last year. And it was like, are you sure you really want more tattoos, Sean?

Like, I'm not that crazy about them. So I went and got five. But it being a mutually agreed upon, like, place where it's not out of the blue, you coming to me and saying you want tattoos, and then I say no, and the kids are screaming in the background. It's a more, it's a, it's a, you're giving that conversation a better chance. Right, of it being friendly. For me, I said I want to finish my dissertation and get my PhD.

I also wanted to fly down to the graduation when that's done. I wanted to add a certain amount of new books to my audible library. I wanted to update my vision board. Every year for Andrew's personal, he always wants to add a certain number of contacts to his address book and his phone. But that's important to me because I love, in my friendship category, I wrote down the friends that I want to focus on most, right? I wrote down the names of that list.

But I also love the thrill of like meeting a new person. So that number to me reflects me still being social, still working on that muscle of mine. And then our last category, kids. For us, this looks like a ton of different things. But Drew and Jett are now getting into extracurricular activities. So one goal for us was how do we foster those. activities for them, protect them within boundaries to make sure they don't get burnt out or they're not doing too much for their age. And how do we foster our family dynamic? So we quantified

like how many activities are just for Drew a week or a month. Is the whole family going? Are we separating our family? Like as far as that we'll do like milestones that we want to help the kids reach, such as like going transitioning to a big boy bed or walking or riding a boy. Or riding a bike or whatever um any types of like routines do we want to read books before bed every night do we want to watch tv every night with them like what do we want that rhythm to look like um this has also looked different in years where i was pregnant or we were trying to get pregnant or we were about to have a baby i'll write in here to you know goals for that pregnancy that birth that delivery whatever it might be that's right and that's it's it and then we'll

conclude the day with a little cheers, a little prayer, and we'll go on to the rest of our day. And yesterday was just so much fun to be able to do this for the seventh time. I know. And again, see the progress that we've made. But in the document that you can find out below, we have a couple different templates beyond what we just walk through. One is like a kind of a monthly scorecard that you can start to use to aggregate all the data. from the past year to help you inform the next year. There's a lot to it.

It does feel overwhelming. And if this is your first year, it's going to be kind of trying to stumble through this, but we'll do our best regardless. There's a lot of people who try to put a metric to all different aspects of their life. I've seen Rob Deirdek do a daily scoreboard or daily scorecard. And there's other people that do it well.

But what I've done is essentially come up with 120 different categories that you can measure or put a this is how many times we did this number to it and that includes everything from how many times a week on average did we drink alcohol right how many times last year did we fast how many times did we go to our kids practices drop the kids off from school how many times did we serve how many times do we have sex right that some of these things feel massively unromantic when you try to put a number to it but it's like if you're not feeling loved in your marriage like that might be an important aspect you know um how much how much did we uh plan for future vacations or how many vacations do we take as a family there's there's all these

different metrics but the whole exercise as you do that reflective standpoint is to go through the categories and come up with rough estimations, if it's your first time, of things that are part of your life. So maybe alcohol is a huge part of your life. And maybe you're drinking alcohol seven nights a week, right? Putting a number to that, I think will then allow you to say, wow, that's way too much, right? And then again, you'll be able to adjust moving forward. So that's how we go about doing that reflective process. We're huge on gathering as much information as possible. Not everybody's into this,

but Sean and I love wearables. We have our aura ring. We have our Dexcom. We have our Apple Watch. We'll like pay close attention to all these different physical metrics. We also, you know, for date nights,

we can go back into our photo album and we take a picture every date night we go on for every vacation. We have pictures of. And so that's how we start to build this dashboard or this scorecard of what happened in the past year

and then adjust a quarterling to the next year. We also have on their information on how to do a vision board and what ours looks like. So that would be the next step to this. We don't do vision boards every year. Yeah, but it is helpful to crystallize that vision,

which I think there's a lot of power in of like, okay, here's my health and fitness goal. I have a picture of Herschel Walker on there. And he's just like this 50-year-old shredded dude, right? And to me, that's like, okay, well, that's kind of my goal. It's not a marathon runner. It's not XYZ. It's like, no, for whatever reason, right now in my life,

that's what I want to look like in 20 years, you know, which then informs what type of workout you're working, where you're working on how many times you're doing it, et cetera, et cetera. So a small example, but we talk about the vision board there and there's other helpful resources as well. So check that out if you haven't. But thank you for listening to this updated episode on dreams and goals. I'm really excited to hear if you guys do this, what you think, how it goes. Please reach out if you have any questions. questions but yeah I'd love to hear what you think of it excited to get the feedback thanks for staying tuned and if you made it this far subscribe to the show give it a rating hit the

thumbs up on YouTube do your thing and we'll see you next time I'm Andrew I'm Sean