The 15-Minute Morning Marriage Hack

This is the Momentum podcast.

Your marriage is the most important relationship in your life. If you're married and if you're not married, your significant other is that most important relationship in your life. This episode is for those of you who are in a relationship and how you can spend 15 minutes or less every day to bulletproof your connection, intimacy, and your care for each other.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so We can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, We are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent positive human evolution, and we always will be.

I've been working with married entrepreneurs since about 2011 and coaching couples who work together, coaching couples who have two businesses together or who have two separate businesses. But as entrepreneurs, we are different than the rest of the world. And we all know this. Our business can really take over our focus and take over our lives. The contribution we make is why we're here on this planet. I look at this as evolutionary hunters. We are those people who are driven by momentum. We want to be out there making a contribution. We want to make sure the human tribe stays alive. We have millennia of epigenetic programming that makes it so we are focused on the hunt. So we are focused on making something happen, creating an outcome. And for a lot of us that's growing a business and making an impact and having influence and changing people's lives. That can be so exciting that we can fail to put the time that we need to into our marriage.

And, in the time that I've been coaching entrepreneurs and relationships, and in the time that I've been on this planet, I have had countless times where I've had either one of our clients or a friend of mine reach out to me. In fact, In the past year, I recently had a friend reach out to me and his name's David Gonzalez and he and his wife, Holly live here in Austin. They've given me permission to share this. We're really close. And David had reached out to me one day and he said, Alex, I am looking for some advice on my marriage. I'm in this personal development course right now. And what I realized was, Holly and I have been married for, I think it was 20 years or 21 years. And he said, I just. There's not a lot of passion there. We're good friends. We are good at working together. We're good at running a business together, but I realized in this course That I have a marriage where there's not a lot of passion. There's not a lot of excitement. There's not a lot of the feelings that I had when we first got together. And David said I made a list of four people and I'm calling all four of them to get the best advice that I can on this. And I was like great, David, have you talked to the other ones? He's yeah, I talked to three of them. I said did you get any good advice? And he said the first person told me he was having some struggles in his relationship. And if I got anything good, I should call him back. The second person said he didn't really have anything for me other than he and his wife like do date nights and he said, Holly and I tried to do date nights or I think I said Cadey and I tried to do date nights and it really worked and he's waiting on the third person to call him back. And so I said, David, I think I've got you covered here.

Cadey and I have been following this 15 minute a day system for over a decade. And here's what I explained to David. I said if you've fallen out of passion or out of that connection with your wife, it's probably because you haven't been creating intimacy. And I don't mean sex. Intimacy, connection outside of sex. You probably haven't been creating that. So I asked him, how often do you and Holly get together and sit down and talk to each other? And he's sometimes when we're having dinner we talk and sometimes we talk, when we're going on a walk or something like that. But we don't really have a time that we just do that. And I said, okay. Intimacy is created very clearly only through time and attention. You cannot create intimacy without time and attention. Now, one of the hardest things for us as entrepreneurs is we look at all the time and attention we're giving our business. Then we look at our relationship and we think there's no way I can match the time and attention in my business to my relationship. Here's the good news. You don't have to. Because. If you're intentional about the time that you do spend on your relationship, you can spend less time but still create that intimacy through the process of time and attention and having the right system that you go through.

And so here's what I shared with David. I sent him a few of our momentum planners, the momentum planner that I'm holding right now. And I told him the process that Cadey and I use. So let me share with you the process we've been using for over 10 years to make our marriage today stronger than it has ever been. And to work through countless issues. I want to make something very clear. I think there's too many people who talk about relationships out there and they present themselves as always having had this perfect relationship. And a lot of the relationship gurus and a lot of people that talk about relationships, it feels that way. It's Oh, we have this perfect relationship emulate us. I think that's just. Crazy. There is no such thing. I have known enough people to know that every single relationship has challenges and has issues. I wouldn't call them problems. They're issues. And as entrepreneurs, we're intelligent enough to improve any issue, but if the issues get to be too much in a relationship, it can get overwhelming. And thankfully Holly and David weren't in a place where they were totally overwhelmed. And that's when I shared what we do. So Cadey and I sit down with our momentum planner. And again, this time together, we call it morning alignment and it takes about 10 to 15 minutes and I share with her everything that I filled in on my momentum planner. So this system, the momentum planning system is part of our personal operating system and it is a system through which you set your goals and you execute on a daily basis and you understand really what you want out of life and you see your progress and the momentum planner is the daily part of this system. And so each day I write down what I was grateful for, where I won the day before, what my intention is for the day. Where I was uncomfortable the day before my top three things that I'm going to get done. And then because Cadey and I like to, we share the top three things that we love about each other. And so I share three things for her and she shares three things with me.

So I explained this to David and I said, David, as you're going through this process and Holly is sharing what she's grateful for or where she won, ask her a question, have a discussion when she's sharing her intention for the day, the two of you should be in when you're sharing yours, the two of you should be looking for opportunities to support each other. When you sit down with this and she both works together, you should be looking for opportunities to connect throughout the day. Maybe there's some time. And when she's sharing where she was uncomfortable, have a discussion around what it was that made her uncomfortable the day before. Now, here's what's so interesting about this. There's 24 hours in a day and we take 15 minutes for our relationship and we create this time and attention that creates intimacy. And I've seen a similar result to what David and Holly have had. So many times that I've lost count. Here's what happened with the two of them. I sent him the momentum planners. They started doing the daily alignment and we hadn't seen them. I hadn't talked to David or seen him in a while. And then we went to a friend of ours, Mike Dillard's wedding. And it just so happened that Cadey and I were sitting directly behind Holly and David at Mike Dillard's wedding. And Holly came in and sat down. David was talking to somebody. He sat down and he turned to her and he said, I just want to let you know how beautiful you are. And then he reached out and held her hand. I'm like, Hey, something shifted. That's not the the type of behavior for someone who's not passionate, who's not connected, is not feeling something. And we talked very briefly at the wedding about the relationship alignment and how they were doing. But just recently we went for a walk with them and David told me that it has become the single most important part of their relationship. And I've had tons of other entrepreneurial couples tell me the same thing. He said, it's so simple and it's so easy and it doesn't take that much time. But he said, within a week or two, I started feeling feelings for Holly and she started feeling feelings for me and we would sit down and support each other. And then we would want to cuddle and kiss afterwards. And the more that we align and the more that we have this connection, the more we see each other, the more we hear each other, the more that we validate each other, the more close and more connected and more real the relationship feels. And on the walk, David told me. And I was so proud to hear this, that he felt like his relationship was in the best place it has ever been from following this simple 15 minute process to connect with your spouse, see where you can help them understand where they're uncomfortable, know what you're both doing for the day, and then also it's really important to understand what they're grateful for and what they, where they felt like they won the day before, because this gives us an opportunity to connect with each other and to really understand what's going on.

And so if you're a married entrepreneur, whether you work with your spouse or not, try this process. And if you're interested in getting the whole system behind it so you can actually plan your future and really supercharge this, I'm going to be training with Cadey. The two of us are doing this for the first time in a long time, actually for the first time ever. Sorry, for the first time ever, the two of us are going to be training the personal operating system and we are launching it on April 4th. So it's 4 4 24 at 4:00 PM so April 4th, 2024 at 4:00 PM We're going to be launching this system and we would love to have you there. In fact, if you want to check it out, you can go to courses dot charfen dot com slash personal o s and register so that you can spend some time with us and see what this system's all about so that we can help you understand the personal operating system. And if you so choose, you can use this with your spouse. But if you don't have a spouse and you're just a single entrepreneur, first, I want to congratulate you on listening to this relationship podcast because you're learning for what's coming for you. And the personal operating system will help you create more momentum than you ever thought possible. And so go to courses dot charfen dot com slash personal o s register for the webinar that we're doing 4/4/24 at 4 p. m. and I'd love to have you there. And thanks for being a podcast listener. I appreciate you listening to this episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next one.