Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 293 | this will be your best year yet

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

We’re back with our goal setting methods for 2026! Today we sat down and went over our individual, relational and family goals for this 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://news.familymade.com/p/it-s-here-east-family-goal-setting-method-of-2025-special-announcement Check out Cove at https://www.covesmart.com and use code EASTFAM for an additional 10% off your first order. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at https://www.BetterHelp.com/EASTFAM For a limited time, Home Chef is offering my listeners 50% off and free shipping on your first box, plus free dessert for life. Go to https://www.HomeChef.com/EASTFAM. Branch Basics is now available everywhere you shop: at Target, Amazon, and of course https://www.BranchBasics.com. And for anyone grabbing the Premium Starter Kit, you can get 15% off at https://www.BranchBasics.com with our code EASTFAM. 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 with Sean and Andrew. This is one of our very favorite episodes to do every single year. I've already been getting tagged. You asked last episode if I was. I now am. Isn't that fun to see? It is fun about people doing their annual goals and going through our entire process. This process changed our entire life. What year was that? That was nine years ago, 2018? I was say 2018 because it was before Drew. How many years ago?

Eight years ago. Yeah. Eight years ago. Yeah. And we haven't really looked back. We've just, like, gone all in on this every single year, and it is a game changer for our entire life. How would you say it's changed our life? I think you can make decisions every single day that feel really good and are really exciting,

but then have a bunch of time go by and look back and be like, how did I get here in life? This isn't, like, what I wanted. And I think you and I were living that life. It was like really great and a lot of fun. But we sat down and intentionally wrote out the first, for the first time, eight years ago, what do we want our lives to look like? And it was shocking for us to see that both of us wrote down lives that looked completely different than what we were living. And so after we wrote them down, it kind of gave us like a compass as to like what to say yes to and what to say no to and how to direct our lives. And now, every year that we do this, it's really cool because instead of seeing on paper, drastically different ways of life that we want to be living, we're like living the life that we actually want.

You feel like that's true? I do. I do. Okay. What would you say to the people who, I feel like it's trending now to be a skeptic when it comes to New Year's resolutions or goals? and it's like, well, why is that important? Like, I like my life the way it is and I don't need to have these grand five,

like, what do you mean a five-year plan? It's meaningless. It never pans out that way anyway. Our daughter was asking me the other day about New Year's and why we don't get together with a big family and like why don't we celebrate New Year's like we do Christmas?

or Easter or like whatever it is. By the way, she was adorable on New Year's Eve. She planned the whole party. We had disco ball themed cupcakes. She wanted a fire with a projector screen outside. She wanted people to dress up. She chose my outfit. She was really excited.

It was really sweet. Yeah. But I went on to explain to her. I was like, it's not really a holiday as far as like we're not celebrating Jesus's birth or like something that grand. It's just a fun day to reflect on the whole year. And I think New Year's resolutions, yes, are trendy to wake up on January 1st and say, you know, I'm going to change every aspect of my life because whatever is, yeah, kind of funny. But I also think it's a great day for the entire world to sit down and say, how did last year go?

And what do I want to change to live either as good as I did last year or better? yeah it's an interesting concept you said of changing every aspect of your life and i think that's part of the reason why this has been good for us is it's been a constant document or reference point for us that we we have not since that first year been at the point where we're like we need to change everything about our life it's more of a reflection that gathering data points and then making slight tweaks as we'll talk about i i also think um i've said this in different context before but over the past three years i feel like since our kids have gotten a little older i've really appreciated the practice of like celebrating things yeah and even if it's a tiny little thing making a

big moment out of it i think it's really important i almost feel like that's what we do with all of our content is make big stories out of little moments and i think that's important because when you're talking a marriage that we want to last for 60 years at least you can just yeah however till the end baby but uh it's like you know the 50th anniversary yeah in some ways it's like redundant with the 49th and the 48th and the 47th and the 46th but it's like oh you make it a big thing because it's the 50th or this year's our 10 year anniversary let's make it a big thing we are like we don't have to no you don't have to do new year's resolutions you don't have to celebrate anything you could just go on about your day and like be productive and do the thing

and like put your head down or you could say wait let's take a step back and make a moment out of this and that's what I think the goals have been for us is making a moment out of reflecting out of you and I having an amazing day together thinking about the year that we just had and the year we want to have and that's that's a really healthy thing for you and I and then also thinking about the moments that we want to create so well I love about the way we go about our goal setting and like New Year's resolutions if you want to call it that whatever. whatever is when we start walking through this we probably write down 300 minimum goals or things that we want to do in a year which we'll explain and what's really cool is when we get to sit down

and go through it and we go through last year there is something so amazing about being like reading through all 300 from last year and being like wow we actually did that and we did that we did that and we did that and it makes you feel so accomplished and proud i will say i think where people go wrong with new year's resolutions is setting a resolution that is very very hard to reach is almost unattainable for this upcoming year yeah that then makes them discouraged in 12 months but the goal is again with this that maybe if you point yourself in that direction it will be attainable, you know what I'm saying? And not that hard to reach in 24 months.

And I would say, like, don't only write down one. I would say if you do have a big one, you can write down a big one, but then dissect that into 50 smaller milestone steps. So you actually feel like you're making progress towards something. I was almost brought to tears a couple times. Sean and I just did this last week, our goal setting. And so this is top of mind. But I was almost brought to the theater with a couple things that you just can't believe happened the way you wrote them down. And like a lot of people like journaling their prayer requests.

And then however long it takes for you to look back at that and think, oh my gosh, I can't believe one, that that happened. I took it for granted or two, that we made so much progress towards it. Or three, that that was such a small request that I had. And now our perspective is so different. we've talked about this before but like the documenting of it really is a beautiful aspect of this because it locks in time and cements where you were 12 months ago and you think that you'll remember that moment forever of how you're viewing the world but you don't and anyway there were there are moments like I'm about to read that happened several times as we're reflecting

over the past year that you're like oh my gosh life is good and God is good you know so one of the things we wrote down was uh in regards to kids which is its whole own section one of our sections um we said go backyard camping and then immediately i think of for the july weekend drew and jett and i are in a tent and the moments that we had there were just magic we said take a memorable family trip boom immediately i think of japan singapore and Dubai and all the moments to throw up on the plane the spider bite um and then freaking brown recluse yeah unbelievable and then and then you we wrote down a year ago here bear our youngest go from mumbling to learning new vocab

get drew into the next school start bear at a certain school and you're like a year ago we were all worked up about where the kids were going to go to school Yeah, that was like a huge, huge consuming thing in our life. I would say dominated your thought process. Which is where are they going to go to elementary? And especially in Nashville when you're dealing with public schools and private schools and every school is like maxed out and there's waiting lists and there's interviews. And it's just like.

Yeah. Yeah. That was a big stressor. But then to reflect on that and we've already been a semester into the most beautiful new school ever. yeah it now we're so relaxed and it's not even a thought anymore it's so funny because there was not even a path yet to be taken and now we're on the path yeah that we started down and you look back you're like wow it's been so good and there's just little moments like that to happen even the sourdough thing you've been talking about that for years this year you finally did it

not only do you do it you taught a lot of other people And like now you're sourdough queen in Nashville, it feels like. So there are those moments of like pinch me almost where you're like, dang, I can't believe 12 months ago, Bear couldn't talk. And now that's our day to day where he is. And I'm excited to have years and decades of these goals documented that we can then look back on and say, wow, God is good. One thing we've been talking about a lot lately is peace of mind, especially at the start

of a new year. Between travel, late nights, packages getting dropped off, and just life being busy, there's something really grounding about knowing your home is taking care of. How do we have so many packages being dropped off, Sean? I don't know. We got to change something. Anyway, the new year is all about fresh starts, and for us, that includes protecting what matters most without adding stress. And that's why we've really appreciated Cove. Cove is an affordable DIY home security system that's designed to protect families for less than a dollar a day, which honestly surprised us. It's professional grade security, but without the overwhelming price tag or long contracts. What I love is how customizable it is. You take a quick online quiz and build a system

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Check out Cove at covesmart.com and use code EastFam for an additional 10% off your first order. that discount stacks with their current sitewide sale easy affordable and peace of mind guarantee so to back up if this is your first time hearing a goal setting episode of hours or if you need a refresher first we will have the document linked down below if you want to do this but we set aside this year it took us four hours we've had some years take us 10 hours we've had some years take us more than a day this was probably the fastest we've ever done it but I also feel like this is the first year and this will probably be laughable we'll probably look back at this in 2027 and be like we thought it was going to be a chill year but this year feels very different because it's like our first year of like pure contentment to a certain extent like we're in the dream house that we were talking about for the past three years and we're at the dream school that we've been talking about for the past three years and we did the crazy show thing last year and we got through that and we're done with

our book and it's about to launch it's just it feels like this year is a very live in calm down relax though like I said in 27 we'll probably look back and laugh at that but the way that we do it we break our goal setting into we have 13 categories 12 12 things like finance business, philanthropy, church, marriage, kids. Travel, personal, health and fitness, and home. And I think that's most of them. Yeah. You can break out your categories however you would like.

With each category, the way we do it, if this is your first year to do it, this is how I would recommend. You set a timer for five minutes. Literally keep it at five minutes. If you go past five minutes, it gets all kind of crazy and too deep. You set a timer, you press start.

and for five minutes, you on your own piece paper and your spouse on another or whoever you're doing it with writes as many goals under that specific category that you can think of in five minutes. It might not take you for five minutes, but whatever. When you say write as many goals as possible, what do you mean? So for friends, give an example of that. For me, my five-minute window would start. I'm in the category of friends. I would say, okay, this year, I actually want to have, if we break it down into 52 weeks,

I would like to see friends once a week for 52 weeks. I would like to start a Bible study. I would like to get X amount of coffees with girlfriends. I would like to go on a girls' trip. I would like to learn my kids' friends' names and have them over to our house a certain amount of times. And then it just starts building. You start unlocking within those five minutes,

deeper pockets of things. when the five minutes goes up if you need a little bit more time you can have it but then you share one at a time you write down your list and then you go on to the next category set a five minute timer and go if this is not your first year

what you would start out by doing then is not jumping into the timing but reviewing everything from last year which is such a beautiful thing and you can then start making mental notes of like oh I put a dollar figure next to how much

I wanted to make in a year and that was too much or too little that felt too ambitious that consumed too much of my time I didn't put enough date nights like you can reflect on that

celebrate and kind of think and then you go into the timing and the goal the reflection is my personal favorite part of the process because it really brings to the surface like oh dang we only did we only had one date night last night

or last year where it was just you and i that went out and we've had moments like that we're like oh that that is a huge problem that we need to change or it could be like um it the reflection i think inspires conversations where in a really healthy context that's not emotionally charged, it's like, I would, I would like to spend more time with you one-on-one, and I would like to do one date night a week with you. And then you're like, yeah, I actually think that's reasonable. Or if there's pushback, then it leads to this conversation of, well, it does seem like you're prioritizing work a little more than you are, our marriage.

And then that, like, you start to, you start to take care of the low-hanging fruit kind of problems. And then, like Sean said, it is a, I think the most. exciting year for us when it came to goals because we're the most refined and highest resolution if you will like the most zoomed in where it's like we don't have there some it's almost felt like our goals size list has expanded and contrasted a little bit uh every year and it's like varied that way but this year it's like we're making just such small tweaks where it's like I would like to host our in-laws for dinner a couple of times.

We've set ourselves into such rhythms because of these conversations and these quote-unquote goals that we've set where we have pasta night, Saturday night. So we see friends that night. And then we always host friends another night of the week. And then we do Sunday night debriefs. And like we've kind of gotten into these rhythms where now they're subconscious and like we're kind of set in our ways and they work and in the healthy ways

yeah yeah and now we're just like making small tweaks we're like hey let's actually add this to that sunday meeting you know where we're not just setting the meetings anymore we're talking about the very specific high resolution stuff when it comes to that so and don't ever let it get discouraging so what happens a lot for us too is we'll go back into the reflection of last year we'll look at all of our notes we'll get to a category and we'll see something that we wrote down and we're like oh shoot didn't do that at all and you either can look at that and say you know what i'm actually okay that we didn't do that at all like i know it was a goal for us but it feels good that we didn't do it it i'm good with that or you can read it and say actually i want to take that into the next

year and try again and do better. I feel like for us, we always have so many goals and data points for, you know, date nights, how many meals a week do we want to cook and, like, actually sit at the dining table with our family. How many nights a week do we want to have friends over? And it's in those categories where we're like, you know, it actually felt good to not have friends over five days a week and only have friends over four days a week. And it's just a good balancing of scales to say, this felt like it filled our cups and it filled our kids cups, or actually this felt depleting. Yeah. And the way we've done the reflection and really written the template for the goals is very quantitative, where it's like, how many date nights did we do

last year 42 of 52 weeks yeah and we went to church 36 times last year and and Andrew got 207 workouts and I did five competitions and I did you know we did four daily divos every week and like we literally put data points to everything I like that because to me you know we come from the athletics background and it's almost like a unbiased third party it also feels like a dial Yes. Where you're like, that felt like the volume was too high. Yeah. But the point is not to be overwhelmed and trying to say, well, how do I?

No. Well, is that 207 the right amount of workouts that I actually did do that? Or you get wrapped up into like trying to figure out how to sort through all the data or whatever? And it's like, no, really it's just a way to try to document everything. And for us, you know, like with the YouTube type of stuff, there are a lot of easy. accessible metrics like views or hours watch or whatever I understand that not everybody has that type of dashboard that they can access so don't be overwhelmed by it view it more as a yeah an unbiased constructive feedback that

like you know it really unlocks a starting point of like a truthful conversation of, hey, was 40 date nights the right amount of date nights? And you're like, well, yeah, because pretty much six weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year's, we're with family, and we're just not able to do that. Yeah, there's probably six there. And then we did three weeks on the road. Yeah, that's probably right, actually. So as opposed to it being this vague conversation that's like, we don't hang out enough. And you're like, well, what is enough? You know, it kind of helps to just address that specifically in my mind. But anyway, if that, does feel overwhelming feel free to do it qualitatively where you're like I would like to do more

of X or less of this and that could be a good starting point I also think one of my absolute favorite things is the sharing side of it because it's such a great way to break out all the categories of life and hear firsthand how content or not your spouses in that and you're not taking it personally to yourself it's like truly looking under a microscope at like oh i didn't know andrew felt i don't know i don't know what example to bring up like you needed more time with friends or you weren't getting enough alone time in the gym or you were super ambitious in this point of business or whatever it is it's a great time to be able to like spread out your entire life into like all these microbe points and say oh

well now that i know that i as your wife can help support that and make you feel more supported and joyful throughout all the categories of your life yeah i think no it just it does lend itself to really good conversation i'm smiling because we're this book that sean mentioned earlier we're actually coming up with like uh i think the most refined and best version of our goal setting system. Our book is called The Courage to Commit. And so it's like, it's all about what is worth committing to and why and how is kind of how we've broken the book down. Anyway, the goals are a part of that. And one of the things that we said you should measure was the amount of times you've had sex. And it's like, I'm just imagining the conversations that we've

had about that and thinking about that. And then also it could just lend itself to hopefully really good conversations, though hard, with people where you're like, we're not having the right amount of sex, whatever that means. And it's like, it's just really interesting what the data points are you on our goal setting. Is that why you're smirking? Did you see that data point or did that just pop up? Did you write that down this year? I did. You did? Oh, yeah, we did. We did. We both did. Excuse me. People liked our,

well, I made a couple comments on the previous episode that we did. They liked it if that was funny. As the New Year kicks off, I am really trying to simplify everything I can, especially dinner. With work picking back up, routine starting again,

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Must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. Anyway, so the five minute timer though you mentioned if it's your first time start with the first section do five minutes write down all the goals if it's not your first time going through you do the reflection and then you do that but what happens when the five minute timer is up then you share with each other so you go one category at a time set the five minute timer right let the timer go off share move on to the next one get through all of them if you feel good with that then we usually try to have like a overall summary for the year of like what's our goal this year I think our goal this year was like to slow down and last year was like a full on sprint marathon in so many different ways

with like the show Morocco traveling building house getting kids into school there are so many huge things happening and this year we said we wanted to like slow down and immerse ourselves into whatever it is we're doing um so we usually write some sort of like paragraph or sentence to kind of summarize what our overall vibe is of the year we usually pray to start and to close and then we just keep them we keep them accessible to look back at to like check in on i don't think we intentionally try to like sit down and look back at the goals a lot but it does help everyone's tomorrow to say oh what were my goals this year and let's see if I can well a couple things one the timer since this is like over the course of a couple hours

timer to me is really helpful in keeping me locked in and focused it's almost like a game because over the course of four hours you can easily like get a little yeah weary of it and you're like tired you're like all right is should we still do this the five minute timer just says, okay, that one's over on the next one. Yeah. And then it like shifts your mind gear from okay, this is, we were talking about friends and I didn't know how to do that one, but

health and fitness, I really have some specific things I want to do, weight wise or PR wise or whatever. It's also, I'm thinking about like our goal setting because it's become so routine to us that sometimes it's hard to explain. It's also a great time for us as a couple

to plan out our year. not intentionally if that makes sense so we're not sitting down with a calendar and saying we're going to go here here and here it's just as you're breaking down your goals for the year between marriage family kids and travel usually within our goals personally a lot of time comes up of like we want to go to indie 10 times a year or 10 times this year we want to go on a family trip with my parents a family trip with your family uh you know there's all these little data points that we then will reflect on it at the end and say okay now how can we put this on a calendar since this is our priority and lock that in so that now as we move forward in business when we get

opportunities to go to an event if it and like if it um conflicts with what one of our goals, we know that it's not worth doing. It's interesting. I think the first thing comes to mind when you say that is our philanthropy side of things, like our charity involvement. And three years ago, it was like, hey, let's go to six charity events because of, you know, we always are giving there. And we're always, I feel like getting involved with,

and engaging with different people's missions two years ago we said hey actually instead of traveling to go to these events let's actually just host events for organizations that we care about here in town and i think it's that's been a good example of how the metric of hey we took eight trips to charity events last year all around the country let's just let's tweak that and just say we'll just go to one this year of this specific charity that like you're we're most resonating with and will host it just like tweaks what the calendar actually looks like and we don't pull out the calendar right there live but it does provide a reference point for future conversations as Sean and I plan that out we by the way we can link this too we've been

buying these um what do you call them linear calendars or they're um like wall a wall calendar but it's all laid out are they called big a calendars that's uh jesse itzlers correct yeah um anyway but that's been helpful to just have one thing that will mark all of our hey this is a kids fall break this is the spring break this is when we're hanging out with the cousins over the summer and so the goals enable that process to go way smoother it also like for us with the business the data point metrics allow us to say oh hey like that was a little off we need to fix that business wise or change these logistics or hire this person or whatever and again it's just like a good opportunity to go through those things and sort through them all yeah speaking of we need to put on our calendar a time

to do our full as you would call it linear calendar yeah I agree um the other part Yeah, Sean mentioned the prayer, and this year we did our goals in the house that we had just been in for three weeks. Which was the first. We have never done our goals in our house. We've always made a rule that we needed to go somewhere intentional. However, we built an office in our new house, and it just felt right. It felt appropriate given all the effort and time. and visions that we had for what we wanted to happen in that house. But I do recommend, like, almost priming yourself to get ready for this more reflective vision-setting process by going to, like, a third place, if you will, a coffee shop or wherever you feel that type of energy. No distractions.

Yeah, no distractions, but, you know, maybe it is nice to have coffee or someone serving you breakfast, so you're able to really fully lock in. But just like, you know, whatever playlist you listen to in the car there, I know that sounds so mushy. And I feel like young Andrew would be like, what is this guy talking about? But I feel this way about priming yourself and goals and values. It really is such a subtle thing that you don't realize how big of a difference it makes until you've done it for years. And like now I think about our values that we've also talked about on the podcast. It's like, all right, do these really matter? Are we just saying words that we aspire to be like? Like, no, well, when you say the words

and you write them down, then you think about them more. And then you're like, hey, was that honest of me or not? Or is this pushing towards togetherness or not for our family? And you're like, so it does matter and the subtleties do make a difference. So everything you can to just like put yourself in a place to do this in an honest, emotionally safe place, I think is good. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, something we've been talking about a lot lately is how the new year doesn't actually require a new you.

Sometimes it's just about becoming a less burdened version of yourself, letting go of the stuff that quietly just weighs you down. for me, that's been pressure. The pressure to have everything figured out to always be moving forward and not to slow down and learning to notice that and learning to notice that and name it and work through it instead of just carrying it into another year. Therapy can be really helpful for that. Having an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motivations and emotions, it's not about fixing yourself. It's about understanding what might be holding you back so you can move forward with it with more clarity. One thing that stands out about better help is the quality of their therapist.

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We've shared a lot of like the goals. setting over the years. But this year, I want us to share each two goals from seven categories, not only to give people ideas, but to share more personally how this process works for us. Okay. Great. Here's one goal. This goes back to giving.

Yep. under the philanthropy bucket. This year we spent over $10,000 on wedding registry gift for all of you listeners and people that have followed us. Thank you for sharing those registries with us. That brings us such joy. And I said, I enjoy that so much. I would like to increase that to $15,000 this year.

That was one of my goals. One of mine in the giving was this was our second year, co-house. hosting the annual St. Jude event in Nashville, and we hit an all-time record of raising $2.5 million in one night. This year, I'm really geeked out about it, will be the first year we are actually hosting hosting it, which is crazy. And my goal is to even exceed the record of $2.5 and raise $3 million for St. Jude. I like that. At our house, which is going to be crazy. another one in that bucket was we have a budget of $200 a month to give to our like gifts to our inner circle of friends and you know sometimes it's because someone lost a loved one or someone

changed jobs or whatever but when it's not those big things it's still kind of good to have that practice where you're like hey I just wanted to send you this gift or these flowers to say, I love you and I appreciate for X, Y, Z reason. So that's something that we increased the frequency of from last year. When I put under the family, it kind of went under both. And a lot of times it can be redundant, which is fine. It's under friends and family. We got into a rhythm this year. We used to host game nights a lot. It was a game night once a month. all year and we loved that but instead of doing something so grand we wanted to take it down a little bit more and make it casual and so we started doing pasta nights every single Saturday and it was kind

of like whoever wants to come to dinner you come to dinner but we're going to have pasta everybody brings a dish and it's very casual everyone cleans everyone cooks but it's just fellowship and family time kids everybody we somehow got into the rhythm this year and it was incredible where every single Saturday night was pasta night, and we had probably a minimum of three families every Saturday. Yeah. But then Burger Night became a thing every Sunday after church, and that was like another three to four families. This year, I want to make sure we can continue that, but I also want to start a third one on Fridays, which is this crazy concept I have of I want to cover all of our tables and paper and just do like no plates, no silverware, kebabs, Mediterranean.

Again, everybody brings a dish, but like a fun. That was a good example of how the conversation would go where it's like, yeah, we did this twice a week with three families and then maybe I would respond. Actually, three families was too many to me. I would like to just have once a week with one family that we could really like connect with personally. I don't feel that way. That would be an example of like when you say the specific numbers, you're like, I mean, is it precise three or four? Yeah, that's probably right.

And is that as much as we want it to be? And then I'm also, I mean, it gets me thinking about where that was inspired from, which is a Bethlehem dinner we did over Christmas, which so many people loved and had interest in. And we shared the kind of how to with people on that. 20,000 people wanted to know about that. I know, which is incredible. And that's why we had so many friends reach out about that.

And that's why I said, why don't we just incorporate this into, like, Fridays? I will say, funny story. I was hesitant to share this, but whatever. I was telling this to Natalie the other night at Pasta Night because she wants to come do this. She was talking about Bethlehem dinner. I was like, well, every Friday. And I said, I have a working name. And I was so convinced of it until I went to write it down.

And then I was like, oh. But I was going to call it Finger Friday. you're wild and then i was right down i was like i don't think i can send a mask text out about figure friday so that's funny she got a real kick out of it if you guys have ideas the idea of being finger food on fridays please share let me know for marriage a couple that came to mind was counseling two times a year so sean and i did a counseling program two years ago where we went 16 times two hours a session every week every week and anyway that was like really needed for us in that phase this year it's like two kind of check-ins is what we're hoping for where you go in

and just like yeah it's it's more of a check-in than it is the heavy maintenance another one i wrote under marriage this year because we we do have such a cadence now of like every sunday we do scheduling out for the next week we do monthly checkups we do devos like we have have our cadence of everything and it works out so well but i wrote i would like eight random coffee meetups so like i'm going to cash it in i'm going to text you on a given day even if it's during work hours i'm going to be like coffee meetup yeah under marriage we also said sex once a week which you know that would be 52 times having sex it's kind of an interesting thing way to think about that over the course of year which is a total of about 70 total minutes of naked

time. Oh, my gosh. Sorry, that's the other reason I wanted to breathe that one up. And that's a minimum, okay? But it is, it will be. We have to hit that quota. It will be a good reference point where it's like maybe one of us is upset six months from now because it's like we don't feel like we're connecting as much that

way. And it's like, hey, we said in a different mindset six months ago, we said we wanted to do this once a week, right? And then it's like, it's a less. it changes the tone of that conversation for health and fitness this would be my last one i said maintain 212 pounds which is very specific but it also reflects like previous years i said i want to run a sub 530 mile i said i wanted to deadlift 450 pounds 15 times or whatever this year this goal reflects a shift away from like performance optimization and more towards longevity, which is,

I don't know if it's just a trend that I'm interested in now, but still you could see that in that health and fitness number as opposed to the previous years. This episode is sponsored by Branch Basics. With the new year, we have been talking a lot about healthier routines. And honestly, non-toxic living used to feel really overwhelming to me. But what I've realized is that some of the most impactful changes are actually the simplest one. One of the biggest swaps we made was our cleaning products. I didn't think much about it until I noticed how often certain cleaners would make my eyes water or give me a headache, and that was a wake-up call. That's why I've been genuinely obsessed with Branch Basics.

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I didn't even share this while we were doing it, but for the past six or seven years we've been doing this, health and fitness for me has looked very different. It's been very pregnancy focused, postpartum focused, not doing anything too excessively. I wasn't putting, you know, PRs or weights or like, it was maintaining healthy pregnancies, healthy weights, everything. and this year was fun because it was the first year I actually got to go back to fitness driven goals and that felt really, really good. So I did like how high I want a box jump, which I figured out was inaccurate. I wanted to do a minimum of 10 pull-ups at once.

I wanted to hit certain PRs for weights and it was really, it was an interesting moment to like reflect on that and be like oh yeah well what do you mean is inaccurate my my box jump I put 40 inches I hate I have 40 I got 44 I want to get 45 no I was asking today I got you um yeah that's great I like that those are good examples um let's go two more okay for business we posted 846 short Form videos last year. Think about that. And that totaled 2 billion,820 million 750,559 views. Can you believe that? Wow. Close to 3 billion. This year, I thought not increased or decrease, I thought probably like 800 short form videos feels good. It feels like sustainable for the team and us. And I also think,

think we are more encouraged to like not chase trends in a way that gets views but like talk about things on the podcast that just are personal interests as opposed to trendy topics and that has actually reflected itself well in the metrics so I want to do more of that that's a qualitative thing but I thought two and a half billion views would be the business metric for next year collectively I like that a silly one for me

to close it out at home at our new dream home I want to get our chickens and I want to learn everything about chickens it's like the new sourdough but these are actually live little things

bees bees I got to face my fear and figure out these freaking bees and then we're already deep in it, you tapped all these sugar trees, these maple trees, and we have gallons of sap at home that I got to figure out real quickly how to filter, clean, boil down, and make into

syrup. I feel like our goals have already expanded since we had this, or changed, where it's like, after we did this, the day after we did this, I think the neighbor kids came over and started playing, and in my mind, I'm like. Which they're coming over after school today because they're going to help you collect all the sap. Yeah, and they need to find the keys to that dang go cart. Anyway, it's like things will change, and that's a good example of like, hey, we thought it was important to do this, but actually let's make more room for this that's presented

itself. So anyway, we will link this stuff down below. Thank you for tagging us in your goal setting experiences. Please continue to do that. By far, the most meaningful thing that Sean and I hear about are. when we do the share these silly habits that Sean and I have. I fully realize this is like overkill and it's weird and it's like aggressive way to set goals and it takes a lot of time and it's not for everybody and that's fine. But it is for some people. It's for Sean and I and it's

positively impacted us. I'm not saying it's the only way to set goals or the right way, but if this has helped you, then hearing about that and how it has helped you is the best. Like that is the biggest blessing Sean and I could ask for is to, like, put ourselves out there and share these weird, quirky things we do. And then here that does resonate with some number of you. So please continue to share your experiences. Please continue to share your wedding registries and your baby registries, all the things. And I guess we'll just do these goal setting podcasts every year. I love it. Thank you for listening. That's all we got. I'm Andrew. I'm Sean. Till next time.