The Jefferson Fisher Podcast - The 3 Relationship Habits Every Couple Should Steal

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson East and former NFL player Andrew East join me for a conversation about marriage, conflict, ambition, and what it really takes to stay committed when life gets hard. We talk about the communication habits they’ve had to unlearn, the systems and check-ins that help keep their marriage strong, and why most people quit too early when things stop feeling easy. This episode is about learning how to grow through the uncomfortable parts instead of running from them—and why commitment might be the thing that gives life the most meaning. Buy their new book, The Courage to Commit https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/787062/the-courage-to-commit-by-shawn-johnson-and-andrew-east/  Leave me a voicemail to be featured on the show! https://www.jeffersonfisher.com/ask-jefferson  Join me on Supercast for ad-free episodes, bonus content, and AMAs: https://jefferson.supercast.com/ Order The Next Conversation Workbook: https://www.jeffersonfisher.com/workbook Thank you to our sponsors: Cozy Earth. Upgrade Your Every Day. Get 20% off at cozyearth.com/jefferson or use code JEFFERSON at check out. Mill. Try risk-free for 90 days and get $75 off at https://www.mill.com/jefferson  and use code JEFFERSON at checkout. ZocDoc. https://zocdoc.com/jefferson to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. BetterHelp. Click https://betterhelp.com/jeffersonfisher for a discount on your first month of therapy. Order my book, The Next Conversation, or listen to the full audiobook today. Like what you hear? Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review! Suggest a topic or ask a question for me to answer on the show!  Want a FREE communication tip each week? Click here to join my newsletter.  Join My School of Communication Watch my podcast on YouTube  Follow me on Instagram  Follow me on TikTok Follow me on LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're no longer young people. You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to before my beta block is off. My co-workers don't take me seriously. It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney.

Welcome to the Jefferson Fisher podcast. Today, my guests are Olympic gold medalist. Johnson and ex NFL pro, Andrew East, a husband and wife couple that are not only a power couple, obviously. They're just some of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've never met. And so it's just a true pleasure. We get to talk all things, relationships, and my marriage, their marriage, and the things that they do to set themselves up for success. If you want to have the courage to commit, which is the name of their latest book, if you want to have strategies for building a better life and a better marriage. Well, then some things you need to have in place. We talk all about the structure. How do you create cadences to check in with each other? How do you set goals? All of that

and more. I hope you enjoy it. What I have enjoyed a lot since moving up here and then hearing about y'all is that you're just good people. Like you're just all to the earth good people. So I'm going to put that out there. It's all a lie. Yeah, it's all a lie. Even though, even though I know, you're human and you're married and know that you have just as much problems as anybody else. Like we're all figuring it out. It's like when somebody says like, well, you just know all the communication stuff. And I'm like, if you only, if you only knew, I can't wait. Like for Sierra sometimes, if she was here, she'd be like, hey, you remember that time?

Are you been in that argument? And then she's like, okay, communication guy. So it can come back to by you. but what I'm curious about. So you have Olympian, a pro-N-FEL, pro-athlete, there has to be this aspect of like your whole life has been perfection and knowing and controlling all the variables.

So I see like control being a pretty big thing. You can go controlling from my diet to my practice to my routine. And then you marry somebody whom you can't control at all. And then you make other humans that you definitely can't control. Can't control them. So how is that, how is that played out in y'all's marriage? Because I think you're coming up on, what, 10 years? Ten years and a couple weeks.

It's been a journey, for sure. And I feel like there's been an arc to it from the beginning. An arc? Yeah, where we both came out of our professional careers, expecting to control everything, and going to the complete opposite. I think both of us coming out of gymnastics and football, had a really hard time with a transition

because your entire life is basically controlled for you. And then all your people leave, your coaches, your dietitians, your psychiatr, like anything with the professional world. And so you're left to do it all on your own. It's just you. And you don't know what you're doing. And we benefited from going through those transitions

at different times so we could kind of support each other. But it's kind of been building from the ground up from there with our marriage. and babies learning how to build an infrastructure to feel like we have control again, but very loosely because we can't control each other. So we're looking and talking to like year 10 couple.

Let's go back to like year two couple. How does, how is that in terms of control for you, Andrew, of like, hey, I want to do what I want to do and I'm used to this kind of routine, but there's a lot of this give and take that you're living with somebody. Yeah. I think people say that marriage goes in phases, and one of the phases is like the power struggle phase,

which is super interesting because we got married pretty young, and I'm really grateful for that. How old are 24? 24. Okay, we were 22 and 21. Yay, great. I'm grateful to have been married young, though, because the whole teaching an old dog, new tricks,

it's a little easier when you're younger to say, okay, what is my rhythm of life? And, you know, we're just transitioning out of the college years. So we're kind of establishing our rhythms together. But there was a lot of conflict and it is confusing. You're like, okay, what's the right way to progress here? I want to be a good husband. I don't know what that means, though.

I want to like, you know, I want to share my perspective while also respecting hers and that the marriage of the two styles and perspectives is a really. really difficult process. We're still in the midst of it, by the way. I feel like every phase, every new child, there's always something changing. But it was really fun to just say, hey, actually, none of us need to be in control. We're team. And you have some beautiful things that you bring to the table and beautiful styles that we should incorporate. And so do I. And then let's just like, we'll just do a little dance with it all, you know? Yeah. We'll figure it out.

I think Sean was right. It's a journey. It's been a journey. Yeah. So I'm curious for each of you, what was a communication pattern that you almost had to unlearn once, y'all? I feel like you just, I feel like Andrew just looked at me like, you dog. You dog. There's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot. We decided to take on a lot when we got married.

That doesn't sound like that's in y'all's nature at all. We went into business together. We became like 50-50 business partners, newlyweds. Andrew was bouncing around the country with the NFL. I was bouncing on the country on a tour with gymnastics. We did everything probably wrong. But communication that we had to unlearn, we're both very ambitious and we're very driven

and we're very stubborn. And learning that we both can't be in the driver's seat at the same time, I think was really hard. I came into our marriage basically running my own company. And Andrew came in with all of the ideas and all of the ambition to lead. And for us, our communication skills had to work. And we had to really unlearn how to both take a step back and kind of start something new instead of saying, this is mine or this is my idea, and we're going to do it.

And it was very difficult. I mean, we're still on learning that. Yeah. I, first of all, if you're listening to this and you have not read Jefferson's book called The Next Conversation, it is so good. Thanks, man.

And I'm so grateful to have read it. I learned so much in that. One of the things, a concept in there that a mentor of ours shared years ago was anytime they'd get in an argument, they'd almost remind each other that we know how this ends, and that's with us still married. And so that's, I think that's been a helpful kind of North Star guiding concept of like, hey,

we are, like, we're on the same team, and this is going to be to our benefit. We just have to figure out how to get there. One communication pattern that I had to unlearn was my dad was a, like, would, he was a, he was a dreamer, and he loved doing any opportunity that you can get his hands on, but he wouldn't necessarily communicate at all to my mom. So he would just like go do his thing. And then it would be like a ask for forgiveness, not permission situation, which, you know,

Sean reminded me that I needed to do a better job at that even last week. So it's more of the considering on the front end and like saying, hey, what do you think about this? Was just not something that I had too many reps at when we were younger. I think the, I like the steering wheel analogy, like who's going to be in the driver's seat

because there are people listening to this and, I mean, look at us right now, you have different, we're all different individuals and we all have individual ambitions. How do you also have the collective ambition? So do you all do anything collectively to say

this is kind of the goal setting we want Oh, yeah. Let's hear it. This is my favorite. When was the first year we did the goal setting? 2018. Okay, 2018.

You call it goal setting? Yes. Annual, yeah, goal setting. Well, we need a cooler name than that. We called it like vision casting at one point. Nice. You gave it some names. You gave it some names for a while.

You called it. There was a mind map and I don't know. There were many names. I would just say goal setting. But in 2018, we were living in Washington. He was playing for the Washington football team. Life was beautiful. Like, it was wonderful.

And we were having a blast. But we sat down and decided to do this goal setting, which we came up kind of out of nowhere. Andrew's dad, the year before, had kind of given us this layout of goal setting. Or it had all these different categories with philanthropy and faith and family. And we basically took that. that, which we didn't do the year prior, and said, let's actually do this this year, kind of for fun. And I remember we sat down at a coffee shop for five hours and wrote down everything we wanted our life to look like. And we thought it was fascinating that both of us at the end of it looked

down and it was completely different than the life we had. Which is odd because our life was wonderful. We weren't upset and we weren't sad and we weren't you know, unhappy, but it's not what we wanted. Yeah. And so that kind of sparked the start of every year we do these big goal settings where we write our individual goals, our goals together, and then we put

them all together to make sure that I know how to support Andrew, he knows how to support me, we know how to make time for everything that feels important to each of us. And then we do check-ins every week, every month, every quarter to make sure we're kind of headed in the right direction. So what do check-ins look like?

week to week. So this has been huge for me because I think I get really, I take things personal and like she can hurt my feelings if she gives me some type of feedback or is trying to hold me accountable to one of these goals.

But what we've done and what the goal setting system has helped us do is like it's almost having a third party in the room that's like this neutral third party. Objective. Yeah. And so when Sean gives me feedback,

it is it's more referring to this third party and not referring directly to me. It's like, hey, remember when we did this and you, it's here on the paper that we wanted to go on 52 date nights a year. And we haven't gone on one in like the last three weeks.

And it's like, as opposed to me getting defensive and saying, well, it's because of whatever excuse. Exactly. It's more like, oh yeah, you're right. Like, we are dropping the ball on that. But the check-ins also help with not taking things personal because it's in the future,

you talk about this in your book, even if it's a 30-minute break, like having something that's on the calendar that I know might be an uncomfortable conversation that maybe she'll give some personal feedback to me on. I can kind of prepare it for that, and I know that I can come in with my guard down and she can come in, having thought about the criticism,

and likewise. And it's like way more of a healthy conversation. It's way less emotional. It's more of like a, hey, I've noticed this pattern over the last couple days of us not living up to what we said we wanted to. And what are some ways we could change that? And it's been so, it has been so helpful and actually inspiring change because like instead of me just feeling offended,

we're like, oh, yeah, actually, you're right. And I'm sorry. And it's a humbling process to have to like, Take it off the chin and say, okay, you're right, I dropped the ball, but let's change some things. But it's been so good for us. Before we're going, I want to take a moment to tell you about cozy Earth. Everything that Cozy Earth does is premium quality apparel and home bedding. So anything that they put out, I have been a huge fan of.

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Let's keep going. The check-ins, I want to visualize them. Is it just y'all sitting at the kitchen? Is it in bed? Is it five minutes? Is it two minutes? And I know they all look different. We have different cadences for each thing.

Okay. And that sounds strange. Annual goal setting is anywhere from four to six hours, and it can't be in our house. Yeah. So it has to be like intentional. We have to go somewhere. We block off time.

There's no phones. And we do it for like four to six hours. Weekly. what would we call the weekly? Sunday night. Yeah, every Sunday night before we go to bed after the kids that go down, we talk about the entire next week.

And that's like logistical planning. So that's at home, obviously, just at the kitchen table talking through. Does the week look good? Does it look like there's enough time for you to feel like your cup is filled than me? Does it look balanced?

And does it, do we feel like we're on the same page? and then every month we do monthly check-ins. Monthly check-in can't be at home. It has to be at some neutral ground, so it's usually a coffee shop. And that's where, for lack of a better way to say it, we can bring our grievances to the table and we're both prepared for it.

So it's kind of like, what are your three check-ins or three things I can work on this month that have been either bothering you or... Things you've noticed. And I say that to say, we still bring stuff up on a daily basis or weekly basis. You're not like harboring them for monthly check-ins.

But that's where we can both come around the table and say, I don't think this is feeling good. I don't think the rhythm of this habit that we've implemented, I like how we know and talk about the kids, like everything. It's kind of an unloading. And that's usually a half hour, hour. Yeah, it's not, I mean, depends on the season of life we're in. Sometimes we're like, I got nothing.

But there are people who might listen to this and go, that sounds nuts. it's not nuts like that's I think what we're about to talk about that that is committing to saying if this is my North Star

this is my goal and that's what that's exactly what it takes like for me and Sierra we have we like morning check-ins and evening check-ins and what I have learned

really helps her in the day is when we talk logistics of that day she we like to talk about you know how we're feeling which is harder for me than it is for her because I can kind of lay out stuff and she goes, okay, you just tell me what you're doing,

you didn't tell me how you feel about it. Or you told me what you did, you didn't tell me how you felt about it. I was like, okay. Brother, self-awareness of like putting a word to your emotion, I'm like, well, I don't know how to do this. But I've heard you'll say to you of like your feelings. Oh, yeah.

And he's facts. You know, and I think that's just, you have to appreciate some aspect of that in some sense. And then third is she, we both like to hear kind of what's God doing your life right now. Like where do you, what did you notice throughout the day that you're kind of working on? So we, but we haven't done the monthlies. I think the monthlies is a good one that we're going to add. My grandparents do this thing or they do an annual contract.

So they write it out of like what they're agreeing to. Yeah. And they'll like amend it from year to year of like actually you're going to be doing this. I'm going to be doing this. And it's like, do you want to go another round? Like that's, yep. And so they're able to like point to the contract. But yeah, they have like a little contract retreat that they do.

And it's like, well, you might be thinking this sounds a lot. But if you want your marriage to be a good marriage, it's hard to do these little things. Yeah. I love the morning and night check in. When we had our second child, we realized that there's so many tasks to do that you just kind of get overwhelmed. next thing you do, you're like, you know, we're just ships in the night, as people say. And you're not actually stopping and looking each other in the eye and connecting. And that, I mean, it can really make you feel lonely.

And so we started what we call Bev Time, where it's like, we'll put the kids down. And the first thing, the first thing we do, it was because we were drinking wine back then in the day. But we used to put the kids down and then, like, jump on our phones. And then it's like, there was this feeling of, wow, I, I really wanted to connect. Yes. My goal here with this marriage, if I zoom out, is like to be fully known and fully loved. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. And we're not really doing that on a day-to-day basis. It doesn't feel like. So we started this time where it's like kids go down and we have anywhere from five minutes to 45 minutes every night where we're just like talking, debriefing, like, tell me about all the things that happened. Because that is a beautiful part about marriage where, like, you're a witness. someone else's life. And like all the little highs and lows in the day, it's beautiful. Your front row seat, man.

Like, I want to hear, I used to be when I was younger, like, so obsessed with, like, getting things done, being productive, being efficient. And so those kind of conversations just felt like, forgive me, but like, unnecessary because I don't know. I didn't see the bigger picture. But now I see how beautiful and colorful that makes life. And I would just love, we get somewhat criticized because. people will say, well, doesn't that come across as too structured and you're losing the spontaneity

in life and like the whimsical romance when you have all these structures and check-ins and these systems and goals? And in my mind, I would like to be as strategic with my family life, my marriage, as I am in business. Yeah. Because I know, like, everyone talks about, hey, what's our five-year plan in business and what are our values and what are our 30-day goals or 90-day goals? Right. at the very least I want to do that same thing for my marriage because it's like it's like a display of effort to some capacity and I know that if I don't have those structures or systems in place I resort to being immature and irresponsible with my free time I'll jump on my phone I'll turn on Netflix I'm scrolling and then you're like you know fast forward five years you're like wait I missed

the whole point right I missed it all yeah life has lived well when it's built well Yeah, yeah, and I think that's the same thing for marriage. Yeah, it can be rigid, but like a good piece of furniture. Like, you've got to have good bones on it. It's going to be hard to sit in, I think. So I am all about that kind of setup. Before we keep going, I want to take a moment to tell you about Mill. Now, Mill has been in our kitchen.

Now, it looks like a trash can. It is not, all right? It's the thing that changes the way your kitchen is going. to run. We've had it now for probably eight months. Not only does a whole family love it, my kids love it. What is Mill? Mill is the odorless, effortless, fully automated food recycler that handles the cleanup after dinner is over. So what does that mean? When you have a plate that's your kind of leftovers and you have scraps, you just scrape it down into the mill and overnight the mill turns it into grounds, shelf stable grounds. And it's awesome. It doesn't smell. We thought it was going to smell. It doesn't.

We thought it was going to be loud. It was not. Like every thought we were like, ah, it's totally covered. And the packaging is awesome. Let me just tell you, you know a company's going to be good when their packaging is, is awesome. So I would say the thing that surprised me the most about Mill is just how well top to bottom the product is worked. We've been really, really happy with it. Also, I didn't really consider how good it would feel to know that your decision of not adding to a bunch of waste is helping, helping the environment. In fact, Mill has already helped divert over 15 million pounds of food. That's a lot of food and that's a lot of good that we're doing for the world. So try Mill risk free for 90 days and get $75 off at mill.com slash Jefferson and use code

Jefferson at checkout. That's $75 off at mill.com slash Jefferson, use code Jefferson. That's mill.com slash Jefferson, use code Jefferson. And now let's keep going. And I want to make sure And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring y'all to my community and audience is because of the book that y'all have coming out, which the fact that you've written this together, if I can give you all the props for that, first off. It's called The Courage to Commit, embrace the radical power of sticking with something. And I thought, man, how incredible, because so many times when we kind of absorb marriage advice, relationship advice, we're always looking for, I think you said before, like the hack.

Like we're looking for that, what's that one little nugget that's just going to magically change everything? When the truth is the hack is the commitment. It is choosing to commit regardless of, in spite of knowing full well that, that's what's going to make all the difference. So tell me, when you think of the courage to commit, how have y'all made that in your way? own. Have you made that happen in your own life? By everything we just talked about. Yeah. Truly, like, working through it and working through all the problems.

And I feel like it, I feel like everybody knows it, right? Everybody knows that to be an elite athlete, you have to commit to a sport and you have to work through the hard days and the grind. And, like, that's a very stereotypical story you hear and people know about it. we had gone through that and we had lived through that and yet we still found ourselves with certain things saying we just need to go find you know the next thing to make us happy

and that's going to fix the problem. The next thing. Instead of saying, you know what, let's just work through the really uncomfortable valley and if we can get through it, let's see what's on the other side. And there are so many times in our life with business and with our kids and even with our marriage and there still will be we haven't mastered

anything by any means but we've i think we're we're starting to see the through line but it seemed like every time we did that we kind of hunkered down and said let's figure it out let's get through this roadblock it just became better and more fruitful and more joyful more joyful more purposeful on the other side and i think even in our marriage whenever it starts to get hard. It's like, okay, I'm not going to avoid it. We're actually going to confront it. We're going to figure out how to work through it. We're going to find, I don't know, just, we're just going to keep chugging along. There's a point in my life after I finished playing football, it's hard to transition out of athletics because it's so intense and there's such an

infrastructure like Sean was saying of coaches and nutritionists and your workout plan, your diet, your friend group, all of it is in this like, really intense orbit of athletics. And you leave it and you're like, I don't have anybody hang out with. I don't have to do with my time. And in that weird phase, after I was done playing, I realized that I was, I was really struggling not because I had chosen anything wrong. It was just because I wasn't making a choice at all. And like I needed to do something. I needed to take the next step, but I was so paralyzed by trying to analyze which choice is the best when really there was a ton of good choices

and it was up to me to make one good choice, the great choice. And all I needed to do was like go with one and walk down that path. And so we're definitely not writing this book as experts, like Sean said, it's more of a, you know, we're students along with the readers

and it was really fun to kind of revisit some of the stories in our life where we had done this well and done it poorly. But it's so easy, especially in any life transition to get excited by the new thing or the better thing. And I would love for the takeaway from this book to be that like, hey, the maintenance costs are probably going to be lower than the startup costs.

So like don't be always jumping, looking for the next new thing. Just like, what if you just stuck to this thing, put your head down, and understood that there's valleys, there's peaks. and when you accumulate all those, you build this deep meaning at the end of this. When you're like, you've committed to one thing, whether that be a career, a relationship, a hobby, whatever, it's like really beautiful.

And it leads to this journey that I think has brought so much fruit to our life. Sierra says something once we were in an argument. Really? Yeah, I don't know you don't know anything about that. And... I had gotten kind of down about it, you know, just the old bad scripts of like just hard to see the positive side. And what she said, well, either way it's good.

Like, can we get to a place where it's either way it's good? And then that really just hit me square in the face. And I feel like this book, The Kurt Chicken Mitt, really touches on that type of mentality of one, it takes courage. Second of all, it's committing to the goal, to the marriage, the relationship, knowing that there will be failures, knowing that there is going to be the low valleys and you're going to see the raw, the ugly, the, I can't believe this, but at the same time you get to learn so much more about this person, because I feel like sometimes it, the mistake I made early on, I made loss.

is thinking selfishly of the impact to myself rather than trying to appreciate the difference in the personality of how she interprets it and how she handles it. Like, what can I learn about this personality and this human and this person that I love rather than making it a zero-sum, like grabbing the steering wheel back? Because you can really,

do that in conflict too. Yeah. For two people that are used to high pressure and, like you said, stubborn. Yeah. And, because I'm sure only one of y'all is, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, you can get in the habit of grabbing the steering wheel in conflict, too. Before we get going, I want to take a moment to tell you about Zoc Doc. Now, if you're listening, most likely, you have some kind of doctor's appointment, dentist appointment of some type that you know you need to be scheduling, but you haven't yet.

because that was me, right? Mine was dermatologist. I know with my family history and skin cancer, I should be going to a dermatologist. That was one of those appointments that I just kept putting off. Well, Zococ changed all of that. It is a free app that not only helps you set an appointment and make sure that those providers are in network. So we're talking about booking in network appointments with more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. So whether you're looking for, for dermatology, like me, dentistry, primary care, eye care, or one of the other 200 specialties offered by Zoc Doc. You can easily search by specialty or symptom to build the care team that's right for you. Finding and booking high quality in network doctors so you can find someone that you

love. You will be able to see all their patient reviews, how they handle things, and the best thing is Zoc Doc will actually set the appointment for you. So that's awesome. And I'm a big fan. I'm personally a big fan of anything that removes friction. doing something really important, like setting a doctor's appointment. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com slash Jefferson to find an instantly book a doctor you love today. That is ZOC, doc, doc.com slash Jefferson. Zocdoch.com slash Jefferson. Now, let's keep going. Knowing that in marriage you're going to have conflict, how do you handle it with this mindset of having the courage to commit? I think I'm,

might answer this in a different way, but one of the hardest parts about writing this book was taking the joy and the purpose and the fruit of all the hard work we've put in so far, and then backtracking and explaining how we got here. And so I think to answer your question, we over the course of 10 years have had such a privilege of failing miserably at arguments and indecisiveness and business failures. But we've had such the privilege of every time that's happened, we've tried to go find what we're used to, which is like a really good coach, a really good mentor,

a really good therapist. And we've tried to equip ourselves with all of these tools and this knowledge to be able to attack arguments and valleys better in any phase or category of life. So the hardest part and my favorite part, and I think the answer to the question is, we tried to take all of that wisdom that we've learned from other people, not that we've, you know, come up with ourselves,

and put it into like a how to and why in the book. And we've actually dissected how we go about it, how we go about implementing a new commitment and then sticking with it. And when it gets really hard and we start fighting about it, what rhythms and routines we can put into place to kind of protect that and make that argument easier to get through. And, I mean, we've kind of gone down to the smallest example of we didn't like that our family was watching a lot of TV. But we wanted to commit to not watching as much TV.

And then how do we actually make that happen? And we even talked about how we took out a TV of our, we took out the main TV in our living room, like in our hosting space. And we thought it was crazy. And it caused an argument. But then we looked back three weeks later and we're like, you know what? Our kids aren't asking for it. We're actually connecting more.

And there's like all of these little examples. But I think within our arguments and our marriage, we've implemented an infrastructure of, you know what? This argument has gotten so heated over something so silly. Let's go back to kind of the tools that we've learned and start there and work our way to the agreement, I guess. Does that make sense? Your question makes me think like that.

The idea of grabbing the steering wheel back, for me, has always come out of a place of like this desperation or maybe this urgency of like, oh, no, but I can't let you do this to me right now. And it makes me think of, Sean talks about how she had to do something like 16,000 reps to stick this certain movement on a balance beam, which I think that's the craziest event in any sport. where you're trying to do backflips on a four-inch wide beam. But just this concept that she's not going to get it right the first time.

And it's going to actually, she's not even going to do it on the balance being the first time. It's like this growing process. And like there's this try, fail, try, fail, try, fail that's not urgent. It's over the course of years that you learn this. And when I started applying that concept to how we had conversations, it made me a little more curious to, to, like, view it from a third-party audience member kind of perspective. Like, oh, okay, well, this is just a rep. We're having this conversation.

We've had the same argument about one specific topic, which is our dogs. Probably, like, the same conversation 200 times. How many dogs you have? Two now. Yeah. And that's where the names of these dogs? Oh, do we have the same dogs? Yeah, yeah, that's fun.

concerned about this. No, okay, we don't have gunned trievers. We have two golden troopers nationally. That's cool. But it's funny, you're like, okay, I'm frustrated. I was at one point frustrated because it's like, why are we still talking about this?

We've talked about this so many times. And then when you zoom out and you're like, okay, this is just a rep. Like this is just a practice rep. How can I learn from this? What am I getting inflamed by? And what am I saying that she gets inflamed by? And then next time when we have this conversation,

let's just keep that in mind and we'll maybe tweak that one next time just like she does with her backflip on a balance we'll, oh, let's tweak this and we'll move our foot placement here and we'll maybe rotate a little harder. Let's just make little tweaks. And when you compound that over time

and you give it a runway to do that by committing to something for an extended period of time and not just like one date or whatever or one rep trying to do a backflip, it really allows you to like see the change happen. So we argue better now. We argue still often now, but it's like, it's with a different mentality of like, it takes the edge off.

Yeah, I think, but I think that's the point, though. It's like you will argue. You will have conflict and you know that makes you better. Yeah. It's like you have to sometimes celebrate the commitment. Like to be in the moment where you're flooded and you're just, you're thinking of all the things that you want to say. And then you have to realize like, man, we did not handle this well, but we can at least like celebrate the commitment, you know,

we can at least have some grace to the fact that we're still committed to this. And can we at least celebrate that? Like, give us a little bit of kudos that we're still still doing this. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people just, they hit that eject button really early. And it really just takes, I'm talking about some deep, you better dig deep if you're going to be doing this because you're going to have some stuff that you go, I know, I was not. not prepared for the way this is feeling. Also, I have like a lighter note, a bit darker. That's why we wrote the book.

Yeah. Culture is very odd right now where I feel like culture is trying to teach everybody that that's not normal. Committing, yeah. Committing and hardship. People, I feel like in today's culture, keep preaching this idea of, if you commit to something, then it shouldn't be hard. And if it's not hard, you know you have the right, you chose the right thing.

And it's so opposite of that. I think no matter what you choose, it's going to be very difficult. But the longer you stay committed to it, the more joyful and the more fruitful it will be. I mean, I fell in love with gymnastics at the age of three, and it was so hard. Yeah. And I even tried quitting multiple times. And I would quit for a week. And I'd be like, you know what?

I really like it. And I really want to go back. but every time I would push through something, it would be more joyful. And I just think culture's got wrong, and it's frustrating to witness. I think that is so well said, John, to be that we, I do think you're right,

where if it doesn't come easy, then you shouldn't just really do it. But it's not that at all. It's that exact contrast that makes it worth doing. Because if everything was easy, then it wouldn't be fun yeah then there wouldn't be i don't think the the fruit the joy yeah out of it and i think if people just keep believing that then they'll never find anything tell me more in the sense of like if if someone is searching in business and life and a hobby

and a marriage or relationship for the perfect the perfect easy commitment of whatever it is you will never find it because you will find yourself in a relationship or a business where you're like, this is so easy, it's meant to be. And you're going to hit your first roadblock

and start doubting that you made the right choice instead of saying, break it on. Let me get through it and prove to you that I still love this. And I think that's why people quit stuff so much anymore.

Do you find any kind of knowing that this is exactly what you wrote the book about? Do you find that there is some of those parallels between what y'all know to be to have the mindset of an Olympian or pro athlete or whatever and then now applying those same kind of principles to marriage? Because it's another thing of like gymnastics. You said gymnastics is hard as really not doing.

Marriage. Marriage is harder. I don't know. Yeah, I haven't done gymnastics. Like I remember once somebody, I was on a trampoline and I was going to try and do a backflip and they're like, you just got to commit. Like, committed myself to the ER, you know, like, that's not going to work. But I can, I have to believe that hearing from y'all that, yeah, being the top of my world was hard, marriage is harder. Yeah, marriage is a lot harder.

Really? Yeah There's a lot of principles you can apply But it's different Because there's so many more variables You're taking two different Human beings and trying to figure out life together And we change a lot

Every year, every day With every kid, with every business So the variables just keep changing That I always laugh In our world there's all these like health gurus or self-improvement gurus where it's like, if you want to be your best self and you wake up at 4 a.m., you take an ice baths,

you get your morning workout in, do your breath, work, meditation. It's like, no, dude. They're talking about it's important to be uncomfortable. It's like, dude, if you want to be uncomfortable and be your best self, marriage, bro. That is like every day you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you got someone else, you're like, all right, this is uncomfortable.

And I feel like most of the guys saying that are guys that are not married. You know what I'm saying? It says like, hey, you get married and have some kids. And then come back to me. Then come back to me. But it makes you better, dude. Yeah, absolutely.

The courage to commit. I'm really proud of y'all putting this message out. I think it's a message that needs to be said. And I think it's a book. You know, they talk about books that come at the right time in the right way. And I think this is spot on. This is a book that people need to hear myself. included, Sierra included,

lots of couples. It really is. It's not just the commitment. There's also the courage part. That is not easy. And it took a lot of courage to write this book and put this out because y'all could have written about

all kinds of different things. But y'all wrote this. I'm excited to share this with my community. And thank you all so much for sitting down and talk with me. Thanks for having us. Do you mind if I close this out and share one last visual here?

I know. I know, I'm sorry. Let's go. I love this. Go ahead, Sean. I'm just going to keep up here. One big, I don't know, take us over time here.

I'll never forget watching Indiana Jones, and there's this scene where Indiana Jones is on this cliff, and he's trying to get to the other side. And to get there, he has to take this leap of faith. He has to have the courage to step in to what he's been told

is this invisible bridge to the other side. And to me, that's what I hope this book inspires is like, hey, you don't know. You can't tell for sure until you jump in and you, like, come on in the water's fine. You know, it's like, you have to take the step. You have to take the leap of faith

in order to get to that other thing, to get to the other side, whether that's a relationship, like the meaningful business, build that thing. It's like you have to take the leap of faith and you have to have the courage and then you have to put your full weight down on that thing. And anyway, I appreciate you having us on,

you're a communication guru. this has been a real treat. No, no, I don't... Keep that guru thing out there. I'm not that. And I do want to make sure and ask this question, who, when you think of

who you wrote this book for, who are the people that come to mind? I was going to tell you, you can look at me in Sierra for one. Is you. Is you. I mean, I'm a mom.

The very person that came to mind is like my kids in their future. But anybody stuck wanting... to feel probably just more purpose in life, which sounds crazy. But we have so many friends who are shopping for the perfect person. And there's, I know a friend who's probably brought three different potential partners to us over the past eight years, who all could have been so wonderful. But people are so afraid of making the wrong choice. And I think you need to start being obsessed

with making a choice and figuring it out. And that's just not what culture wants to to do right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you. So much for your time.

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