Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 48 Our 2021 Goals

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Today, in episode 48 of Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew, we talk about our goals for 2021. A few topics we cover: How we make them  Why we think it is important What our big goals for 2020 were What did we hit? And what did we miss? What our big goals for 2021 are If you haven’t yet, please rate Couple Things and subscribe to hear more. Follow us on Instagram to keep the conversation going at https://www.instagram.com/couplethingspod. And if you have suggestions/recommendations for the show, send us your ideas in a video format – we might just choose yours! Email us at [e-mail]. ––– We’re supported by the following companies we love! Make sure to check them out using our links below. Care/of ▶  Try Care/of with 50% off your first order at https://TakeCareOf.com and enter the code COUPLETHINGS50. Zola ▶ Go to https://zola.com/couplethings and use the promo code SAVE50 to get 50% off of your Save the Dates! Releifband ▶ Head over to https://reliefband.com and use the promo code EASTFAM to received 20% plus FREE shipping and a no questions asked 30-day money-back guarantee! Stay in touch! FAN MAIL ADDRESS: Shawn and Andrew East 750 N San Vicente Blvd., East Tower, 11th Floor, Los Angles, CA 90069 Follow My Instagram ▶ http://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Like the Facebook page! ▶ http://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Twitter ▶ http://www.twitter.com/ShawnJohnson Snapchat! ▶ @ShawneyJ Follow AndrewsTwitter ▶ http://www.twitter.com/AndrewDEast Follow My Instagram ▶ http://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Like the Facebook page! ▶ http://www.facebook.com/AndrewDEast Snapchat! ▶ @AndrewDEast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome back to Couple Things. My name is Andrew East. And I am Sean Johnson East. And this is a show, what do you tell them? All about couples and the things they go through. That's right. We are really excited about this year.

We plan to continue growing, interviewing some awesome people, talking about topics you guys request. And we thought we would start out this year by. talking about our goals, how we set them, the resolutions, the whole shebang in. Yes, so this is something Sean and I have done for three years. And I will say there's kind of three buckets of content on this show. If this is your first time listening, we do episodes where Sean and I just sit down and talk. Yes.

Of which this is one. Yes. We do interviews with other couples, couples like Luke Combs, Tim Tebow, Andy Roddick. P.K. Suban. Yes. Yes. And then we also do live shows.

So those are three different buckets. But today we are discussing goals, just Sean and I. And this is something that's kind of near and dear to our heart. It's really important to us, enough so that we thought, you know what? Let's just sit down with our pod people and talk about how we do this. Because I think this is one of the most. connecting conversations that we have all year. But before we get started, before we go down this path and journey with you,

if you haven't yet, please subscribe to the show and give it a rating on whatever platform you're listening to. We are on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you can listen to podcasts or audio. You can find us there. So we love to hear feedback. We'd love to hear which type of show you prefer listening to and what topics or couples you would like us to discuss. Before we jump straight into it,

I also, if you are new to a couple things, the reason why we started this show was, I feel like the world started to paint this picture of couples and relationships as a one-size-fits-all. It was kind of like if you do this and you do that, if you follow this rulebook, if you play by these rules and say these things, your marriage, your relationship,

your dating relationship, your life will work out. And I hated that because within the world of reality TV and tabloids and magazines, all you read is about the failures of relationship. So a goal we had was to expose relationships and show that they are messy and ugly and they go through hardships in every single relationship is so different. And however you do it works. you can make it work and you can come out on top. That's right. And by no means are Sean and I in the position to really give relationship advice beyond our own experience. No, no. So our goal is

to just kind of share stories that hopefully you can relate to or you know someone that can relate to them. So that's our goal here. And ultimately, we strive in all of the content we put out to encourage individuals and families towards deeper connection. Absolutely. So starting it off of this year with goal school setting. I want to take you back to 2018, right? The first year we did it. December 2018. Yeah, we were living in Washington.

Andrew was playing for the Washington football team. That's right. Formerly known as the Redskins. It was, yeah. And we started doing this thing where our life was chaos. We were traveling every other week. Andrew had been traded many, many times. We didn't know what our future.

looked like just because so many things were uncertain and we felt like we should sit down and really think about what we wanted the next year to look like. Andrew was kind of sifting through his emotions and thoughts of if he wanted to continue with football, I didn't know where I wanted our business to go. I didn't know where I wanted our family to go. We were talking about buying like a permanent house, but yet chasing her on the NFL with temporary apartments. It was just a lot. A lot was up in the air. A lot was seemed chaotic. And then we came across a mentor who recommended, hey, why don't you do vision setting?

So we didn't really know what that meant. We didn't know what that meant. And so our first take at this was just sitting down and kind of coming up with goals, but doing that together, which the side effect, I feel like there's so many side effects of us actually discussing what we went out of life, us debriefing how we thought they'll pass a year and several months. months had gone. And then us just understanding better how to support each other. Yes. And so I felt like the intention of, well, let me set the scene for you. We went to a coffee shop. Yeah. It was one of Andrews off days. So he didn't have practice. And we sat in this coffee shop for five hours. And I know that sounds like a super excessive amount of time, but it flew by. And I feel like one of my favorite things that has come from this goal setting.

is not the resolution side of New Year's. I don't agree with, oh, it's January 1st. We have to change our lifestyle. We have to follow this diet. I need to lose 20. Like, no, that's not what the New Year is about. But I do believe that every year, if you can reflect on what you've done that year

and where you've taken your life and what paths you've gone down and just kind of reflect on, are you on a path that you like? It can really set your intentions to get back on path I'm back on track to where you want to go. Or it can reaffirm that you are doing things the way that you want to, like you see fit.

That's right. I was listening to an interview of a guy who started an organization called 80,000 hours. And he shares the concept of, hey, when you go out to eat at a restaurant, you spend maybe 1% of your time thinking about where you actually want to eat. And then the average career, we spend 80,000 hours working. What if we spent 1%? 1% is not a lot of that time. about what we actually want and then you expand that to you know how many hours you live

in a life what have you spent actually just just one percent thinking about what do you want to accomplish with with your time here that we're given so um that's yeah that's why we wanted to do this yeah so going back to the coffee we've got our coffees we got our teas we got everything to kind of hunker down for a while we had a piece of paper and pencil i remember or pen yeah and we just wrote and what we did is this is going to sound strange but we divided it into categories Andrew that's right so the different categories are finances travel family friends marriage health and fitness philanthropy home business faith and personal now you can add subtract do whatever you want to that category list but that's where we started and again this

was our first year and I pulled out my phone and I set a timer I said okay we'll give five minutes to every category and we're going to start the clock and as soon as five minutes is up you're going to stop but within those five minutes under one category whether we start with finances or home i want you to write what your vision is for this next year what do you want what do you want your home life to look like what does your house look like have you changed you know the piece of artwork on the wall right inside the front door are you still is your master bedroom in the same place How is your lifestyle looking at home this year? And you have five minutes to write that.

And we did. So I love that approach because, you know, they say you learn what you really want the moment that you have to make the decision, right? So like, you know, when the coin flips in the air and I, if I was to tell you, you have to make a decision by the time this ends. Like you kind of learn. So the five minute time cap was helpful for us. And then we started doing the end of your vision, which essentially fast forward a year

from now, 12 months from now. And you have these different goals kind of is how we got to that end of your vision, which is like, hey, we want to, you know, make sure that we host people once a week at our home. Or we want to, you know, add photographs to the front hallway, actually write a paragraph almost like walking through. Hey, you know, Sean and I had such a fun time like hosting people and we had X, Y, and Z dinner. And we got this grill to whatever, like actually paint the picture of what it looks like. if you were to actually achieve the goals you wrote down. Well, and I feel like a lot of times I was,

I don't want to say a victim of this, but I made this mistake year after year, where I would sit down to write resolutions and I would get so overwhelmed that I was writing my life future. And what this mentor had said to us is stop trying to like plan out your life and plan out your next year,

plan out your next day. And then at the end of that year, let's see where we've, you know, what finish line we've crossed and where we've ended. and if you like it, continue and make more goals that had that direction. If you don't like where you ended up,

let's say, okay, tomorrow, instead of hanging the picture on the wall, let's take the picture down and do something like completely different. It's just keeping it into that vision of what do I want this year to look like, I think really simplified stuff for us and allowed us to kind of paint this picture of a life that we wanted.

Yeah. So I was just going to say, you know, They say you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a lifetime. Yeah. And it's not so much about like actually maybe achieving the goals as it is the fact that you're putting yourself on a path and you're being intentional with your time and with your day. Kind of just exit you from the monotony of going through the motions of life and enters you into, oh, let me actually think about how I spend my time and what I want to do this week. and if you were to do the things you most loved doing in life,

what would that be, you know? So to finish out the process, we would do this. We would set the clock for five minutes and we would go until the five minutes was up. We'd take a little breather, sip or a little coffee or tea, and then move on to the next category. We did this until we finished, I think, 10 categories. So it took us an hour. And again, it goes by so fast because you're just so, I don't know,

sucked in by your dreams. And then after we were done, took another little brief. either and they were like okay let's set the clock again we'll give each other five minutes but let's talk through our goals tell me everything you wrote down under your marriage category what do you see for us what do you want what are our goals what do you want to better what do you want to stop doing and let's combine our goals to be like a unified um vision of how we can support each other to succeed this past this next year. And that doesn't mean me sacrificing goals because you didn't have the same one.

It could be like, hey, I'm going to help Sean achieve this goal that she set out. And it was things like maybe Andrew wrote, let's host people six days a week. And I'd be like, okay, babe, you wrote you want to host people six days a week, but I wrote I want to date nights a week and I want a family night. So how can we compromise those two to make sure we're both succeeding within our goals? Yeah. So a couple other things. I do want to share some of our goals if you're comfortable doing that.

Yeah. For which year? I do. So we'll get there this year. Okay. But I do kind of want to explain the full process that we go through. So Sean mentioned the five minutes. She mentioned the 11 different categories.

A couple other things I do recommend doing is if you have a spouse or significant other, do this with them for that exact purpose, Sean was just saying, of like being able to understand each other better and support each other in a really different and meaningful way. Sean and I also pray before we start. We think that's an important component just to make sure that, you know, we're not just doing this out of selfish motive.

We like to kind of welcome outside wisdom. And so we do hope that we approach it in that way. One way to think about goals is like maybe you start with what you want change. Like what are you disgruntled with now or things that you want to grow on. If you're, you know, some, it is sometimes hard to, when you're looking at your first year of trying to set goals and it's a blank sheet of paper, you're like, I don't know.

Just start about things, start thinking about things you would want to change. And if you don't mind me interjecting here, I will say when our, when we did this for the first year in 2018, we, we got very intimidated by how much we wanted and we wanted to change. I feel like we loved the process and we are so inspired by each other's dreams and where we wanted our lives to go. But I remember in 2018 our sheets of paper being such a drastic difference to the life we were actually living. And we had all of these things that we wanted to do differently than we were doing then. And during that next year, during 2019, we worked so hard to achieve all of those goals.

That when we sat down to do our goals for 2020 and then 2021, it was like, I can't think of anything I want to change. Meaning, meaning the first year of setting goals was really difficult because we'd never done it before. But the second year was really kind of just minor tweaks. Yeah. And so I think a lot of that goes, sorry, I keep interrupting you. I just have all these thoughts. I think a lot of that goes to you can, you can make the mistake of living life with no intention was really just kind of. of saying yes and no to those split second decisions day to day, but if you truly write down

a path for yourself and a goal, it just, it makes you start living a life that you actually want. Yeah. And that would be my next step is one thing that really helps Sean and I is say our first year, when we set goals, we said we wanted to do date night every Thursday night. So literally in our schedule, we put in, like in our I calendar schedule, we put in from five to 9 p.m. on Thursday nights is booked. So now anytime someone asked me, hey, Andrew, can we do a call at 5 p.m. Thursday? I look at my schedule. I'll be like, actually, no, I can't because I'm busy. And I have a tangible, like, almost excuse to point to. But as Sean was kind of discussing about debriefing, if this is your first time doing this, do spend like 30 minutes kind of just reflecting

over the past year and patting yourself on the back for milestones that have gone well. And then like also discussing the thing like the tough things but we again it's I know it's past the new year it doesn't matter when you do this just as long as you do do this you know and I know I think another way to simplify it we kind of changed that up this year is those five minutes that you a lot for each category split that in half do a two and a half minute timer for what you liked about this past year and what you wanted to change and then the next two and a half minutes say what you want this next year to look like. Yeah. It is really fun now that we just have one Google doc of all this stuff. And we go through when we do our debrief of the previous year, we go through and make notes of like, hey,

you know, we did an awesome job of this. Or, you know, we wanted to travel. We'll talk about a travel goals. But we went to X, Y, and Z location and we accomplished this. And it's just like, it's so fun to be able to reflect and like to pause. Because otherwise you could just literally get swept up into the next thing. I think one of my favorite goals that we made in 2020 was the day. night because it was a huge year for us we were pregnant we were having our first child our life was getting ready to be turned upside down for the better but be turned upside down no doubt and we made this goal in December of 2019 and we said I want to do a date night every week every Thursday and no joke even with having a baby even with being nine 10 months pregnant I would guess we made

48 of the 52 and I think the four we missed were over the holidays for Thanksgiving and Christmas yeah we did it and that's been one of the most fulfilling things um so let's just share some of our goals if you don't mind let's go through uh for 2021 yeah what are our goals uh when it comes to uh finances yeah shall we yeah okay we're gonna kind of kind of we won't share all of our ins and outs, obviously. We go into taxes, we go into how much we want to contribute in a year. So we listed off our different projects, which is like our social media, the unicorn coffee, teddy and bear, and then our other residual projects and wrote down

exactly financially how much we would like to earn. Yeah. Okay. So I wrote tangible figures for each of those in the Google Doc. Well, and to give a point to that, too, when you're talking about finances, something we did this year was we looked at, you know, what we made this year for each company. And we compared that to the amount of effort or the sacrifice that it took from our family. And we would say, okay. Reading, playing, learning.

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i i'm good not making half of that just because it sacrificed too much yeah so important thing to do um then we also said other people we'd to that note of not wanting to sacrifice family hey are there other people we can include to help manage uh or help with these projects uh and we again we went through and each project we have going on the coffee the teddy and bear and you know, children's line, the social media, we kind of listed, hey, we, somebody really needs to help with the manufacturing side of things or the shipping side of things. I remember that being a goal for 2020. We wanted to find full-time child care. And that was a huge conversation we had because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, but I also really wanted to work.

And we thought the best way we could succeed as a family was to find someone to help us. Yeah. One of the things we said was start paying quarterly taxes. So at one point, we were just paying the lump sum at the end of the year. And that put a lot of stress on us. It was just so stressful. We also wanted to, this past year we gave over $350,000. Yes. Together with our community.

And we set that goal at $500,000, which I would love to reach that goal. Half a million dollars. Yeah. And a huge goal of ours, too, just given our family beliefs, was to be able to give majority of that to a Christian foundation. Yeah. And then we also wanted to contribute to things like life insurance and retirement things. So we set figures for that.

Do you remember that whole debacle? That was a huge goal of ours in 2020 is we were aimlessly roaming around the financial world. We didn't know how to just do anything. Yeah. And so a goal in 2020 was to make sure we found the right team to help us. To clean up our accounting and to clean up and help give us insight into how to invest and things like this. Again, a lot of these things can seem very small and unnecessary to write down. But if they bring any stress or any, you know, sleepless nights or thoughts in the middle of the night, they should be written down so you can help better them.

Yeah. And it's just a good, like tangible reminder of, oh, yeah, I did say I wanted to switch like, you know, get an accountant or whatever. So covered the first category of finance. Let's go to travel. So 2020, our travel goals got slaughtered. Yeah. But this year, we wanted to go to a location for a baby moon. We did?

Yes. We wanted to take one mission trip to Tijuana to help with my brother's organization called Hope Sports, where they build houses for impoverished people. Let's talk about family. Yeah. So one of our goals was to have a weekly and monthly schedule. So like literally print off a large block calendar and write off. any weddings or like you know like the holiday travel we're going to have to do like write that on the calendar just so we have a better idea of what our time looks like we did it for the first time in 2020 because we kept finding ourselves being put in these situations where you get so wrapped up in work and you would get so wrapped up with your like daily schedule that something would come up whether it's a friend's wedding or a trip we were supposed to go on or an event and it'd be like oh I completely forgot about it we're too busy it's

two last minute we can't go. And so in 2020, we printed out an entire 12 months like calendar and wrote everything on there to make sure that we, we prioritized our family and our friends and our community over work. We said only eat out, let's see, twice a week. Yeah, because, well, with a new baby this past year, we did a lot of postmates too much. And so a goal is to kind of get off that and start cooking again. Yes.

Switch health insurance was one of our family goals. We're still on NFL and we really got to get our own. Yeah. We also wrote down that we wanted to get pregnant again. Okay. So let's move on to Friends then. We wanted to do, let's see, we wanted to use our gym, have someone come over and use our gym socially distance and safe at least twice a week.

So funny thing about that. We literally became the COVID gym where it's in our basement. And because all gyms were shut down, all of our closest friends, they would literally book a time a day. She's talking about like two people. Yeah. But they would book a time of day and you would hear them come in. And they would come in with their own like cleaning rags and Lysol.

And they would work out and Lysol everything down and then leave. Yeah. We also mentioned in friends that we wanted to find one of our friends a girlfriend. Yeah. Yeah. J.C. looking at you, boss. Any single girls out there? We got a great friend for you.

We do. So let's move on to marriage. So we wanted to hit 45 out of 52 possible date nights. So there's 52 weeks. We wanted to go on a date night 45. We missed the first one already. We did. All right.

I only got six more to miss. Yeah. We wanted to do our morning devotionals five times a week. That's been something that takes 10 to 15 minutes, but it goes such a long way until like just making sure Sean and I actually have a conversation about a good topic every day. We wanted to go to marital counseling twice this year. Yeah. We had sex goals on here.

Wow. We did. We did. We did. We did. And then we also mentioned our monthly checkups. Yeah. Which we've talked to you guys about before.

Every month we go to a coffee shop or we just get out of the house. We sit down and we say, okay, this is a safe space. what did you know I do right this month and what did I do wrong and not necessarily right and wrong but and it's not goals it's literally just like hey it's it's a time where you can have hard conversations of like hey Sean you hurt my feelings when you said this yeah right or I've really been struggling with could you help me with a laundry or just anything it's just fair game to put it on the table we had health and fitness goals um we wanted the gym to be used by someone daily that includes us and then also the two friends we were talking about um i wanted to i'm

doing american ninja warrior fingers crossed and um wanted to drop down to 215 pounds uh for that i wanted to finish in the top 10% of the crossfit open and then i have other things as well uh you had some certain goals but maybe more private for you more private for you let's go on i can share Let's go on to philanthropy. Well, share your end of year. No, well, you to, this is, I don't know how to talk about your health and fitness goals. Go ahead. I can share them.

Okay. My goal is to get pregnant this year, to have a baby, and to do it all within a healthy weight kind of range, which was a big goal with Drew. So I wanted to stay within like a 30 pound weight gain, I guess. This is just the way you say it. And then I also wanted to have a healthy postpartum, making sure that I took enough time postpartum to heal my body and then slowly got back into the gym and got my body back to like pre baby weight. Philanthropy. We mentioned the mission trip. Yes.

We mentioned the total donations with our live stream and events that we would like to donate, which was $500,000. And we wanted to do three charity events. We've been invited to certain things. We'll obviously have to see how that pans out. We did put an asterisk to that virtual or in person based off the year. So whether it's Tim Tebow's Night to Shine or Reggie Bush's, we would love to do that. For home, we are working on the content house, that whole project. We would like that to kind of be done by the end of year.

And we want our house to be done because we're moving our whole workspace from this house over to the content house. Ideally. And we are doing a whole YouTube series on that so you can subscribe to the main channel for that. We wanted to finish the upstairs landing to be a playroom and move it out of the man cave. We wanted to finish the new nursery. That's right.

Switch out the master bedroom stuff. Yes. The Drew's room upstairs. And then get the garage organized. Yeah. Oh, and add four pieces of art. Oh, yeah. For Faith, again, so some of these you'll notice

kind of we double dip. We want to do the devotionals five times a week. We wanted to go ideally to church in person once a week. Well, again, asterisk. Yeah. I wanted to read six faith-based books over the year and interview two pastors over the year. I wanted to read four books a year. I have such a hard time turning my mind off.

So I love reading books, but when I'm so preoccupied with like mom stuff and it just is really hard for me to turn my brain off. So my goal is four. um for business we wanted to uh help our coffee team grow for unicorn um we wanted to uh prioritize the teddy and bear children's line we have some really fun things going on with that uh some stuff that like really is really special for us we'd also like we'd also like to get help for our podcast shows like in the form of a producer of some type, just to really give you guys the best experience. So, again, if you guys have any recommendations on that, send it our way.

And then Sean also wanted to write a book this year. Yes, working on it. That's right. We have two more, personal and kids. So on personal note, I wanted to read 24 books total over the year, improve my scheduling. and then continue listening weekly to a couple of my favorite podcasts that I feel like really help me learn about certain things. I wanted to start a monthly girl's night because Andrew has monthly guys night.

Whether in personal virtually, we'll see. Yes. Yes. I can't read it from here. Sorry. And then read. Read the four bucks a year. That's right.

Yes. Oh, you forgot this one. I can't read it, baby. There. Oh, I won. I wanted a, I want a mommy makeover in 20. What does that mean, though, by the way? You're talking about your brows and lashes.

I get it. Yeah. And then for kids, we wanted to figure out, she's supposed to be going to like daycare-ish. Ah, she starts like school, kind of. For Drew Bob? Yeah, which is, we'll see. Finish swim lessons.

Yeah, because they got cut short last year. We would like to do two new experiences a month. Yes, for her. So whether it's like she's never been to a movie thing, theater whatever daddy valentine's breakfast yeah and then read at least one book a day which we're doing pretty good at yeah and crush into the books that's right and then potentially it's on for baby number two but that are those are kind of specific slash vague depending on what the topic was goals for 2021 um look you just got to write it down um we we do hope that this episode inspires you or changes

your perspective in some degree or some capacity, Sean and I truly believe that you were made to change the world and you have talent and experiences that nobody else has. And so if this episode encourages one person to take a step closer to what they were made to do, then we'll consider it a success. And when it comes to couples, sometimes it is hard to share your dreams and to be that vulnerable, but the best thing you can do is let your significant others support you and whatever your dreams are.

And whether, no matter how vulnerable it is or how hard it is to share, let them be your biggest cheerleader because it truly helps you both succeed as a couple and kind of see your dreams come true. Listen, we're thankful for you. Thankful that you took the time to listen.

And if you feel so called, then please subscribe to the show and give it a rating on whatever platform we'd love to see you stick around and continue to get your feedback. That's all we got for you. Thanks for listening. I'm Andrew East.

I'm Sean Johnson East. And this is the East fam. Out.