Ep 80: Love and Marriage with Maggie Reyes

Y'all, buckle your seatbelts because I have the most precious, brilliant, wonderful, heart-first person here with me today, Maggie Reyes.

Maggie is the author of the book, "Questions for Couples Journal," and in this episode, she reveals how concepts like design thinking and iteration can breathe new life into your relationships, whether you're single, dating, or married.

Maggie also explains how improving self-talk and communication can lead to personal growth and stronger connections with loved ones. We also talk about gratitude in fostering resilience and happiness within partnerships, and how one person's positive behavior can create a ripple effect of change within a relationship.

Tune in because our conversation will inspire you to bloom and transform your connections with those around you.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• How to apply design thinking and iteration to relationships
• Balancing influence and control in personal and work relationships
• Reframing your origin stories to promote growth and stronger relationships
• How one person can change a relationship using systems theory
• Maggie's tips and advice for improving and nurturing your relationships

Maggie Reyes' Bio:

Maggie Reyes is a Master Certified Life Coach and Modern Marriage Mentor who specializes in helping driven, ambitious women create their best marriages, without waiting for their partners to change or adding more work to their lives.

In her coaching programs, she mixes principles from positive psychology, cognitive science and simple coaching tools that you can learn today and apply tomorrow.

Maggie is the author of the best selling Questions for Couples Journal  which has over 3,000 4 star ratings on Amazon.

And she is the host of the The Marriage Life Coach Podcast which is consistently ranked among the top 2 percent podcasts out of over 2 million podcasts tracked by ListenNotes.

When she isn’t teaching or coaching she loves obsessing over Formula 1 Racing, Bridgerton, reading fan fiction, sexy romance novels and watching superhero movies and Mexican Rom Coms with her hubby. 

If you want to learn how to stop doing the things that poison the love in a relationship and start doing the things that make love stronger, you can find the tools to create your best marriage at MaggieReyes.com.

Mentioned in this episode: 

• Maggie Reyes' website
• Maggie on Instagram
• The Marriage Life Coach Podcast
• Questions for Couples Journal by Maggie Reyes 
• The Gottman Method and The Power of Storytelling

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Transcript

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

Well, hello everybody and welcome to episode number 80 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. Y'all buckle your seatbelts because I have the most precious, brilliant, wonderful, heart-first person here with me today that I know. I've talked about a couple times Maggie. I said a couple times to everybody. Soon this person, this golden, amazing person, is going to be on the podcast and it took us a while to schedule this and here today with us. I'm not even going to give any of my normal other anecdotal intro stuff because I just want all the time for the Maggie Reyes herself to be able to talk. 

Maggie is the creator of the marriage mindset makeover, the creator and host of the marriage life coach podcast, which is amazing. It has some incredible stats which I'll let you share. Maggie, it's like top 10. Yeah, yeah, it's so good. 

And then author of questions for couples journal, which are these 400 questions that you walk through with your person. What she says is to enjoy, reflect and connect with your partner. Max and I use these. We're still working through them. We got the book like five months ago and he and I dork out on this stuff, as you all know, but we're still walking through them. We probably will take like a couple of years to go through them, but I know some couples who just binge this. I've given it to my mom and my dad and a couple other couple of friends. 

Maggie I didn't know if I told you that, but anyways, Maggie has created all this incredible work in the world and it's all in support of marriage and couples, and I'll tell you a little bit later on how I want anyone that isn't married or not interested in marriage to think about this, but for now I just want to say that Maggie is a total light that is just shines in the world. I have had conversations for the first time in swimming pools in Florida and then over dinner tables and other States, and just like hearing Maggie talk on microphones at Masterminds. We have shared some coaching communities together and I am just a big, big fan of not only Maggie's like capital W work in the world with her programs and her podcast and her content, but also just the impact that Maggie has on anyone that she is around. She is an amazing listener, and you can just feel her beautiful, illuminating presence anytime you sit across from her. So, thank you, Maggie, for being here, and I'll let you introduce yourself in whatever ways I didn't share. 

Maggie (Guest)

This is amazing. With an introduction like that, it's like have me back anytime. Whenever I need a pep talk, I'm just going to turn on the podcast. This is amazing. With an introduction like that, it's like have me back anytime, Whenever I need a pep talk. 

I'm just going to turn on the podcast. This is what Marie said about me. Call me when you need a pep talk. I love it so much. So, hi everyone, I am so excited to be here. First of all, I love you, Marie. I think we're going to have the deepest conversation. It's going to be amazing. I just want to tell everyone that before I worked as a marriage coach, I worked in human resources for almost 15 years-ish and in training and creating and all these different aspects. So, all the things we're going to talk about, we will relate them to you. So, if you're in a relationship, if you're not in a relationship, don't worry. You come along for the ride. We will bloom you up. 

Marie (Host)

That's right, we're going to bloom you up. Yeah, along for the ride. We will bloom you up. That's right. We're going to bloom you up, yeah. So, if you're interested in marriage or are married, great. If you're not interested in marriage, if you're not interested in partnership, if you have multiple partners, you want multiple marriages wherever you are. This is going to be valuable to you, to any relationship. That's what I always get from conversations with Maggie, and so apply it to anything you like. Yeah, anything else, Maggie. 

Maggie (Guest)

Nope. Let's dive in. I'm so excited for what we're going to talk about. 

Marie (Host)

All right cool. Me too, I was telling Maggie before this geeking out on how I've really wanted to hear her perspective on turning ideas into real things, which we all focus on here in relationships. Because here we talk about turning ideas into real things and, with your brilliant brain, I'd love your lens on how this applies to ideas that we have for our relationships, because the work that we do here, using design, thinking and iteration and all of our amazing conscious mind and subconscious mind tools to make ideas for the changes that we want in ourselves and in the world and in humanity, to turn those ideas into real things. We do a lot of work here, but so much of that is like just living in ourselves and where ourselves meet the world. Yeah, what's your take on turning an idea into a real thing in a relationship where you it's all such a mirror and you really can't control so much of what happens? I'd love to get your perspective on this. 

Maggie (Guest)

Okay, I have two different aspects of that. We’ll start with and then we'll see where we go with it. But the first one is really important, and I think it's relevant for design thinking. It's relevant for anything we want to create in our lives is to really understand the distinction of the difference between influence and control. And so often what I have found in my own life and in coaching so many people around so many different things, is when we think we can't control something not always, but very often we abdicate our ability to influence it. So, I've been, and I'm and I'm as guilty as this as anyone else. 

So, it's like I was on an HR team, and I was like, well, I don't set any of the rules, I'm not the leader, I'm not the manager and like, well, I guess I'm going to sit back and just follow whatever they tell me to do, even if it's wrong. Right, I've done that, right, yeah, yeah. But it's like, wait, okay, I'm not the leader, I'm not the manager, but in my little corner of the universe, how do I want to run my role? And so, I used to be a recruiter and recruiters I don't know how it is now, but back then you had a really bad rep. They would like not be respected, they would lie about jobs, they would like not give realistic job previews. It was like not a profession that people were like so proud to say, huh good. And I went into that profession thinking you know, this will not surprise you, Marie I was like I connect people with their dream jobs. 

This is amazing, this is sacred work. How do I want to be a recruiter? So, even though I didn't set the standards for the team or how things were done overall in the company, I was like, well, what can I influence? I can influence how I do it and I can control that part. And I can make sure that anybody who is one of my candidates, if they survey them, they're going to say I had the most amazing experience, I loved my recruiter right, like I can control the part that I can control. So, I would say the first thing is to really notice where we do have influence and what we can do in the roles that we do have influence, even when it doesn't go our way, even when we disagree about how it's done. 

One of my biggest frustrations back then was my colleagues that were like my internal clients or my department heads. They would take forever and ever and ever to get back to me, give me a decision, give me a status update. And I had no control over that. But I was like, but how can I? What is the way that I can impact the client experience or the candidate experience? And I was like I used to have this. This was my signature email, it was the non-update update and like once a week I'd see whoever was pending and I'd be like, hey, here's a non-update update. I haven't forgotten you. I'm still waiting to hear back. As soon as I hear any news, I'll let you know, just checking in. So good be delighted. 

It would be like I've had people say to me no recruiter has ever treated me that way or has ever done something like that, and it was. 

Marie (Host)

I was literally telling them nothing because I had nothing to report yeah, but you're just practicing the golden rule like you wouldn't want to be left hanging right. 

Maggie (Guest)

Yeah, yeah. So, the first thing in turning ideas into real things in situations where we can't control from a to z, right, which is most of situations all the time, everywhere, right, yeah, it's the first thing is well, what can I influence and how can I just exert my maximum amount of influence in that? So that's part one of my answer. The part two of my answer is how do we make the ephemeral concrete? I'm sure you talk about this in other ways too, but so in something like marriage, coaching and what I do now, it's like well, how do you know if it's working? And it's like well, how do we make the ephemeral, the things we can't touch, hold, put our hands on, how do we make that measurable? 

To think well, are you having more sex or less sex? Are you arguing more? Are you arguing less? When you come home, do you feel relaxed, or do you feel stressed? We can start creating some parameters or milestones or specific things that we can look at on the calendar and say they happened, or they didn't. Are we having more date nights or less date nights? Are we? You know stuff like that? So, whenever we want to turn ideas into real things, it's like well, let's, let's take a moment, and it's what is the real thing that we want here, yeah. 

Marie (Host)

And then let's say that real thing is like I want for my partner to be, I want my birthdays to be more special, I want my partner to give me gifts on my birthdays, or I want the bed to be made, or I like the things that we are hoping for. That require not only our own actions to change. For instance, we want a date night, and so then we start scheduling date nights and invite our partner on date nights. Or we want to have more sex, so we initiate every time. But within relationships, oftentimes, if someone of us is carrying all of that or here's a great example being an active listener every time when the other person isn't being an active listener, right, like if there's something that actually requires our partner to meet us in the middle, how do you sort of like understand, influence and control within that context of a relationship? 

Maggie (Guest)

Okay. So, I'm going to give you some thoughts and I want to preface them, but there's always nuance. Like marriage, work is not black and white and it's so easy to think about. I know I used to be a vlogger. I used to write all these listicles like five steps to feel closer tomorrow. And marriage work there is nuance in it. So, I'm going to give you some thoughts, but prefaced with there's nuance here. 

So, the examples that you gave birthdays, date nights and then active listening let's take those because they're very concrete. So, let's talk about that. A couple of them, them. So, I did. I personally wanted my birthday to feel more special. I personally had that one, yeah, yeah, and so many of the ones that you listed. 

The step one is to get clear on what you want, and then step two is to ask for it, and then step three is to be open to your partner's answer. Step four could be to accept your partner's answer. Step four b is to grieve your partner's answer, but it's not what you wanted, right? And then step five is how do I get that need met, even if my partner can't meet that need? Yes, yeah, I just came up with that off the top of my head. So, these are special steps, people. These are just like places. We can sort of pinpoint some things to think about. 

So, let's go back to birthdays, because it's the example the easier it is to follow. So, I wanted my birthday to be special and I asked my husband this true story would you take the day off on my birthday? And I want to just go to the movies and be like kids and like be like teenagers and like play hooky from work and like, could we do that? And he's like, yeah, I could do that. And so, we did that. Right, Bridgerton is my favorite show for a lot of reasons, and I read the books 20 years ago when they first came out and they last time they came out it was like on a weekend, but this year they came out on a Thursday. 

So, I asked my husband, can we make it Bridgerton Day and have it be a holiday in our house, and would you take the day off and like, watch it with me? And he said yes, right now. In this case, he said yes, and it's great and we watch it together. And there are times when it's a no, right? So, for example, bed being made, I'm a no, I do not want to make the bed. So, if he wanted that, hypothetically I'd be like that's just not something I'm interested in doing and he would have to grieve my answer, yeah, and decide how much it matters to him. Does it matter to him enough that he wants to do it because it makes him happy and delighted to see a bed made, or does he want to just live with a bed unmade, like we get, to then decide how we handle? Whatever the thing is, that is a no, what's coming up for you with that? 

Marie (Host)

Yes, okay. So, there's a couple of things I want to pull out. First of all, I want to point out a couple of the things that you've said to everybody listening. First of all, when Maggie described how she inhabited her role as a recruiter, she was. I want to just highlight this magic sauce that I see in a lot of people who are successful in, specifically, the feeling of fulfillment and whatever they're doing and how they're choosing to inhabit their roles in their life is the question that Maggie asked herself, or the approach that she had, was not how do I, how am I supposed to be a recruiter, but how do I want to? Right? So, you were like what does this look? It's like wearing an outfit. It's not how am I supposed to look in this outfit? It's like what does this outfit look like on me, right? 

Maggie (Guest)

How do I tailor it to me? Yeah? 

Marie (Host)

Tailor it to me, what do I want to accessorize with it? How do I wear this? Where do I want to wear this? And so, I love that. That's both in recruiting, how you were, and also, I hear that in marriage it's like what is important to him, what is it to you, which again applies to all relationships, right and respecting the autonomy and parenting by the way, everybody the autonomy and the boundaries of each person, each person's yes and no are as important as the other. 

And then the other thing I want to pull out of what you said is the specificity of the ask for the birthday is not I want, and I just I want to pull this out because I think this is so hallmark of successful relationships is, instead of saying I want you, I want to be more important to you or I want to feel more closeness to you. I think that's great, but we can set someone else up for so much more success by saying what that specifically looks like. What is our specific request? Our specific request is not can you make my birthday more important to you? Can you take the day off and go to a movie with me? 

Maggie (Guest)

Yes, okay, I'm going to say something so sexist, so just everybody beware. But most of the men that I have ever met in my life, so in a case study that's completely unscientific and not representative sample, okay, I have yet to meet a man who's capable of the subtlety that most women I have met in my life are all capable of. So, if I said, Marie, I'd love to spend more time with you, and I made a really general vague, she would say when do you want to have a Zoom? When are you traveling near me? What are we going to do? How will we make it happen? Should we plan a girls weekend? She would take my very subtle bid for her attention, and she would nail that, and we would plan it and be on our calendar and be done. 

You say the same thing to any man that I have personally met not a relative, you know, statistical, valid sample I'd like to spend more time with you. They say, oh, that's nice, we should probably do that sometime, someday. Okay, so I just want to say to everyone I feel like this is a public service announcement we all have people in our lives who are incapable of subtlety. It does not mean they do not love you. 

Marie (Host)

It just means you need to be concrete in your requests, okay ah, there you go, beautiful, concrete request, which is goes back to that, the ephemeral, to the concrete. Totally so, so, so, so, so good. Okay, yeah, I also think that that can be like with dishes and with, you know, bedrooms and with things that you want help with. There's the yes and the no, the grieving or the like. You know, am I willing to live with this, what am I going to do with this? And but it makes it so much more helpful to get concrete with that too. Is it, like, you know, my request of you is that the dishes get done once a day, or is it the request of you is that we never have dishes in our sink at any time ever? It's like, the more concrete anything that we make as a request is, the better. 

And then the other thing I just want to lead into here is I love how one of Maggie's beliefs that she says on her website, that I've heard her talk about before, is that one person can change the world, which, yo, you know I say that every episode. So that's very aligned. And she also says one person can change a marriage. So then again, if we expand that word marriage out to relationship, I love that so much, and I think it's really counter to what a lot of us think in relationships that we lose our hope and our happiness and our connection and our power because we think we both have to be changing at the same time. So, can you talk a little bit about, as we're thinking about, these changes and making them concrete and making requests where's this philosophy come from and how have you seen it proven? True that one person can change the world and one person can change a relationship? 

Maggie (Guest)

I love it so much. So, first of all, like I grew up like Oprah was my TV mom and I read books that changed my life, right, and stuff like that Even the British and books that they kept me company, you know, and gave me something to think about when I was single and sad and lonely, right. So even something comforting and innocent like that, it's like that book changed my world at a moment in my life where I really needed to just feel comfort, right, when hear witty banter and see a family being, you know, family together. So, throughout human history, one person has changed the world in a variety of ways that we can all look back at our lives our second grade teacher, you know. 

Our guidance counselor at school you know people like that in our lives. And someone like Steve Jobs, right, and how he changed how we look at technology or anything like that, right, we have so many examples of one person on a mission changing how we think about things, how we do things, how we experience life. You know all these things. So, then I have this in the back of my mind and then there is a theory in psychology called systems theory, which is when one element in a system changes, the other elements in the system respond to that change. Now, what does that mean? Respond to that change. 

I work with individual women who want to have better relationships, better marriages, and their partners are not in the coaching room with me. So, what happens is we change how they're showing up every day, how they are asking for things instead of demanding things, how they are being more concrete instead of ephemeral, how they're showing up for the relationship they want to have. And what happens is their partner is now responding to something different. So, the behavior of the partner does, in fact, change in response to what's in front of them in that moment. Now what happens a lot of times is you're not actually married to a jerk, you're just married to a person having a bad day, and they do love you and they want to take the day off to be with you if that's meaningful to you, or they want to collaborate with you to do something or whatever. 

But sometimes their response is actually I have no interest in having a different kind of relationship with you. Either way, that's data you want to have. Either way. You actually are changing the dynamic of the marriage because you're like, oh, you actually have no interest in being a partner with me in this adventure that we call life, or oh, you have such an interest in being a partner with me. There's some things you're good at. There's some things you're bad at. There's some things I'm good at. There's some things I'm bad at. We can renegotiate the stance, so it works better for both of us. 

Marie (Host)

So good, beautiful, and what I want to pull out of that to you that I keep hearing, is that the person that Maggie's describing, the person that we all want to be, is the person that is focused on what we can control and also, in creating the outcome that we want, we're focused on the intended outcome. 

You said showing up for the relationship that they want to have, right, so it's like showing up with the intended outcome in mind, or the dream or the vision or whatever. It is not. What we do, I find, often in relationship is get really bogged down in the moment and the right and wrong and the black and white thinking and they, you know, I'm in the right, he's in the wrong or she's in the wrong instead of what's going to get us to more connection or what. How can I ask this in a way that's more likely to lead to the outcome that I want and that vision always in mind, and our, our ego gets in the way and our habits get in the way. But I see that in our work here, turning ideas into reality is when you can get out of the weeds of the moment and refocus on what's the outcome you want Like. For us, we call it believing in the after until it's real. 

Despite yeah, despite all the evidence that you're still in the before, you believe in the after, and when you reorient on the after, again and again, it guides you through what's the right next step right now. Oh, that's so good, so interesting, and how that relates to relationships believe in the after until it's real. 

Maggie (Guest)

So okay, we use different language for the same thing. So, I tell people make your vision bigger than your history. Yeah, because a lot of times people have had 10, 15 years, 20 years of history with this person of so bits and things and whatever and it's like, but we have to make the vision bigger. I used to work in the cruise industry, so I imagine like the pull of the ocean, if you imagine, you know if there's the under, I forgot what it's called the undercurrent when it's like pulling you in a direction and it's like that feels so a direction and it's like that feels so strong. You have to make your vision bigger than that. 

Marie (Host)

Yeah, the toe line has to be strong. Oh my gosh, so good, so good. And what I give me the chills when you just said that, Maggie I haven't heard that way you say it before and I literally can you know, can think of just the vision in your mind expanding in size and color and saturation, and just like, how can you believe in that vision more than the pool of history and all the things that have pissed you off, or how you know it's going to go right, like how we can ourselves I already know where this is going to go. And what gave me the chills about that is just how that, what that could create when applied to even communities we're a part of, or sibling relationships, relationships with in-laws or parents, or just gosh the work. Talk about that a little bit. How does the work that you do inside your primary relationship, or love relationship or marriage, impact who you are out in the world? 

Maggie (Guest)

It's so massive because when you have the most difficult conversations with the most difficult person, to have difficult conversations with all the other ones just become easier. So, my favorite example to give about that is I had someone years ago that I was coaching. She wanted to be able to have conversations about money with her husband without arguing and getting overwhelmed, and he was a very numbers-oriented person, she was very creative person, and so she would get overwhelmed, but they would also argue, and we spent like weeks just unraveling her own thoughts about money, how she felt about it, about we had to do like self-forgiveness work on some money she had spent. That she then she didn't regret it, but she felt guilty for having spent. It was like this whole pretzel. We unwound and we spent weeks doing that and then she didn't regret it, but she felt guilty for having spent. It was like this whole pretzel. We unwound and we spent weeks doing that and then she was able to sit with her husband and talk without freaking out. That was the original goal, the byproduct of that goal, months after we had worked together. 

So, everyone, imagine if you open your email and the subject line is an endless amount of exclamation points. There are no words. Words, it's just exclamation points, right, and I opened this email with just exclamation points and she's like you're never going to believe what happened. And I'm like try me, cause I've seen a lot of magical things happen over the years. And she's like I got the highest raise in my entire career, with back pay, yeah, and I was like what is this. And it was because she could speak with her husband without freaking out. 

Marie (Host)

She could also speak to her boss without freaking out you know, what I love about what you just said, too, is that that, one step before that, was being able to talk to herself without freaking out yeah, yeah, so good so cool and that know, Maggie, you'll relate to this. 

But people come to me and they want to like scale their business or write a book or start a new brand or what I like, some very tangible project, and half of them will end up talking to me about their mom for six months first, right Like it is, or you know their mom, their life, their feelings, whatever it is it may that you work on makes everything else doable or stronger. You show up in all the other places in a different way as well. 

Maggie (Guest)

It's so powerful, yeah, and with your kids so. Many of my clients will come back and say my relationship with my kids is better because I'm talking with them more intentionally. Like all of the things they're practicing with their partner, they get to practice with their kids too. 

Marie (Host)

Yes, I, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And the other aspect of if you do have children that you live with, with your partner, the model, any work that you do on your partnership then becomes a different model for them to see of how to be. 

So powerful, so powerful and so important. Yeah, okay, one thing that I love about Maggie, and I love to share with Maggie is that she loves a good origin story. So good, we have a little Instagram channel with a couple other people where we share origin stories that we see. Can you talk about what? What makes a good origin story and what do you love about them? And maybe, like, what does that mean about how a couple felt then and feels now? Anything you want to share about the origin story? 

Maggie (Guest)

So, I thought about this a lot before our call because I wanted to say, when you said origin story, it also reminded me of like superheroes and like yeah, yeah, how do you become who you are? Right, it's just an origin story. And how, how do you tell your story about yourself, about who you are and your origin story? And I was thinking about how, in so many different movies, tv shows, things that we watch in the media, they, they do something called retconning, which is when you hear the term ret, it means that they didn't like the origin story they had, so they changed it, like suddenly the uncle's alive or instead of the thing didn't happen, and then they just change it Right. And I was like, yeah, like in movies, or like something has gone too far in a direction that they didn't anticipate and they're like we're just going to pretend, like we said, that cousin was alive. 

Marie (Host)

Oh, right and they're like we're just going to pretend like we said that cousin was alive. 

Maggie (Guest)

Oh right, that kind of thing, right. And so, I was just thinking for everybody listening. We're going to talk about origin stories and relationships in a second. But whatever your origin story is right now, if you don't love it, what do we need to retcon? What do we need to say? You know what, instead of like for me, I grew up without a dad and I have an abandonment wound and it's kind of like a thing that I know, and I live with it. But my origin story is like how strong I was, that I did so many amazing things and have such healthy relationships, even though that happened, like the story I tell about it. I could tell it as the hero of the story or I could tell it as like the victim of the story, and I like the hero version so much better. So that's just for everybody in general, about your origin stories. 

Marie (Host)

But now we're going to talk, let me add, two things to that really quick, yeah, yeah, related to Maggie, I think I've talked about this on the podcast, maybe part of it before, but I had a huge eating disorder in my early 20s and I almost died from it and it used to be such a source of shame and it is such a source of pride for me now. You know, just, you can totally be right how you relate to the experiences and what you rewrite is just like what does it mean, right? What does it mean that you walked through that? What does it mean that you healed from it? What does it mean and whose responsibility is it? All of that can be entirely different than what it exists, how it exists for you right now and I'm just going to pause there, actually, and let you go to couples, because I want you to have all the time to talk about this- yeah, it's so fun, okay. 

Maggie (Guest)

So, I love the work of the Gottman Institute. They are a couple a married couple, psychologist, who research relationships that thrive, relationships that don't thrive, and they have all kinds of different evidence-based interventions on the stuff that they research, and they very heavily influence, like my approach and my thought process about a bunch of things. And one of the things that they talk about is they can tell the strength of the relationship by the way a couple tells the story of how they met. So, they have talked to thousands of people over the 40 years or so that they've been doing research, and they can just tell by the way the story is shared, the level of detail, the enthusiasm. Is it cheerful, is it just a monotone. They can just tell by how you tell the story, sort of the state of the relationship. 

So, one time I was telling Marie this is something that now I had read, that you know in theory. And then now when people tell me things, I like listen and I'm like, oh, listen to how these people tell the story. And then listen to how those people told the story and just watch what happens and let's see five years from now story and just watch what happens and let's see five years from now are those people still together or not? We'll just have to see. It's really interesting to listen to people's origin stories and you can even think about it with your job, with your business, with a house you bought, with anything that you have a story about. You can really notice the relationship that person, the emotional connection that person has that thing, based on how they describe it. 

Marie (Host)

You know what I want to say right here too. Well, a couple of things that are cracking me up in my head. One is that I know a lot of couples, including Max and I, who tell the story in really different ways and has so much more detail, his way less detail, but like the same amount of reverence, but his voice, his style, you know it really makes me want to tell it together at some point. What happens, the in-between, right? But I want to say that if you have never had that much reverence for your origin story, just retell it right now. Like I don't make it up, but I mean like what do you remember when you look back on it that you've never, haven't thought about for a long time, or whatever. It's all. You can retell your origin story as a couple if you are coupled, or your origin story with your parents or with your siblings, or whatever. You can adjust that from right now forward. You know this isn't like a test that you're getting. 

Maggie (Guest)

Yeah, it's not. It's interesting too and isn't like a test that you're getting. It's not. It's interesting to notice, like when you're out having cocktails with friends or something. But it's also something that you said is like how it's. I think the whole theme of our episode is Cynthia between what can we influence and what do we control. We can decide what kind of story we tell about all the different things in our life, right? 

Marie (Host)

You know another thing that I've heard about I heard this long ago, and I've heard that one of the hallmarks of truly successful relationships is that the people in the relationship or the marriage leave that it's very, very special and unique and even different than the other marriages around them. Right, and that belief that it is different, it's got a superpower, it's a super marriage or super partnership, whatever is like. That is a hallmark. And I, what really stands out to me about that is like, of course, you and I, both really focusing on thought, work, right, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when you believe that you have something special and super heroic and unique. It becomes that and how. That again relates to our self-concept, our concept about ourselves or our relationships with other people too. What do you think about that? 

Maggie (Guest)

I love that. I haven't heard it exactly that way before, but it makes so much sense, like it really tracks for me. Because how would you treat something you treasure? Yes, prioritize it. You take really good care of it; you check on it. You wouldn't be on autopilot with it, you wouldn't ignore it, you wouldn't treat it with disdain or disgust, right? So, the idea that it's something that I treasure then influences how I show up for it. 

Marie (Host)

Yes, you know, what's interesting about that too is going back to that idea of like inhabiting roles as you right, but also idea of believing that you have something special and unique, support you being in your partnership in your way, instead of the compare and despair way of like. I don't look like that couple. We don't do things like that couple. We're not as touchy feely or we are. We're way touchier feely. Whatever you're comparing to right becomes irrelevant because you have something special and unique that has its own way it gives some. 

Maggie (Guest)

It’s so permission giving to be like we're so special and unique. We do it this way right. It's a beautiful permission giving kind of mindset to have, and I like to think this is kind of funny. I've said this quote years ago, I wrote it in a blog post and it's on like cards and supermarkets in like the Midwest, and one of my friends took a picture of my card. So, I say that, like, marriages are like fingerprints, they're all different and they're all beautiful. And I really think that, especially in 2024, we're recording this we can take marriage and make it whatever the heck we want it to be, and my personal mission as a marriage coach who's also a feminist woman on planet earth is let's take this institution, where women were once property, where it wants property and own it and make what we want it to be like. So those are my thoughts. 

Marie (Host)

So good, so good. I also, it's occurring to me that what we see as special and unique, it makes you know, the practice that we all know has wonderful benefits on us, somatically and psychologically. The practice of gratitude right, so much easier, because if you have something that you consider to be really special, you're going to be really grateful for it. You're going to be counting, you know, not taking it for granted every single day makes that gratitude inherent. 

Maggie (Guest)

Gratitude is such a powerful force it is. I literally have a 30-day gratitude challenge that I do with my marriage clients because gratitude there's a I don't know the exact journal it was in, but there's a journal that did a study and it's in the. Where did I find this? It was in the Berkeley. They have a special unit on happiness where they study just different things than happiness. So, if anybody is familiar with that website, it's a university in California and you can put gratitude and marriage in Google and Berkeley, and it'll come out because I forget what it's called. But they did a study and they found that gratitude trumps everything else, like your socioeconomic status, the problems that you're having, all of these different factors that they measured. If you're constantly practicing gratitude in your relationship, it's like making it so resilient. It's like it's like a vitamin. Vitamin resilience for your relationship is to practice gratitude and so many of us don't and we like need to. 

Marie (Host)

Yeah, yes, and I, you know, when we're focusing on the gratitude, it's sort of like you put your phone in portrait mode or whatever. The gratitude parts become really clear and the things that aren't exactly as you would have them become foggier because they're not in focus. They're not what you literally are focusing on, right? Yeah, and I always joke around with people about, like you know, the people in your life. When we want to hone them into every edge being exactly what we want it to be, we lose the person themselves. As you know, Christopher Walken can't be Christopher Walken unless he's Christopher Walken, right, like whoever that actor is that you really love. Oh, Bridgerton, right? Who's your favorite Bridgerton character? I love them all. 

Maggie (Guest)

I love Anthony and Kate. Season two is my favorite season. Okay, okay. 

Marie (Host)

Okay, Whatever Anthony, right? What are his spiky edges? 

Maggie (Guest)

Oh my gosh, he's controlling and annoying. 

Marie (Host)

But like, how uninteresting would the story be if he wasn't controlling and annoying, right, but he also deeply cares about his family and wants everybody to be safe. 

Maggie (Guest)

Like the reason that he's so annoying is because he's trying to care for people, sometimes in a very sloppy way. Oh good, so you? 

Marie (Host)

see the light instead of the shadow side of the same qualities, because gratitude in the person, yeah, totally so good. Oh, my gosh, I love that All right. One of the things when we're talking about this, about a gratitude practice for the person that we love, and we're talking about what we control can control, and we talk about making concrete requests and we talk about how any work we do in our primary relationship makes everything else easier. How do we apply that to our relationships with family in-laws? I know you know lots of my clients will go on holidays or vacations or whatever with people that you know are the other main trigger. Yeah, what's your advice? I know you work with people on this. What is your advice as we enter into the summer holiday, where people are spending beach trips and mountain trips and all the you know, birthdays and everything with maybe their in-laws or whatever? How? What's your advice here? 

Maggie (Guest)

Okay, I have two things. One is to ask yourself this question what do I need in order to be nourished and I'll give you examples and I'll make it a little bit more concrete is like do I need time alone? Do I need time with a specific cousin? Like, do I need a specific setup? So, some people grew up in large families and they love the hustle and the bustle and the noise of everybody, and it fills them up to just be surrounded right, that's what they need to be nourished. 

I grew up with a single mom. I need quiet time. I'm also an introvert, so in order for me to be present and open and loving to these people, I also need time by myself, right? So, the first question, whatever things you're planning with your family, is what do I need in order to be nourished? And then we protect that at all costs, which means we'll have to say no to things, we'll have to disappoint some people, we'll have to make some asks that we maybe didn't ask before. We want to add intentionality to the time that you spend together, and I always joke around that I'm a Democrat and a family of Republicans, so I have a lot of experience with this. 

Literally that's not literally. And so, what do I need? To be nourished? How do I want it to go, right? So, if I'm going to Thanksgiving and I know people can go off on all the tangents and we're a Latin family with all the passion that you can stereotypically imagine that we would have, how do I want it to flow? So, I remember vividly one year. 

I was like I think it was an election year. So, imagine the election year, November, thanksgiving. Okay, put yourself there. I was like how do I want this to go? What the heck am I going to do? And I was like I'm taking uno with me. I'm bringing uno, and we all sat around the table. We had the smack talk, we had all that stuff, but it was. It was, instead of dividing us, right, we were cracking each other up and just making each other laugh. And it was. You know, my husband sat next to me. He's like I want to stay married. I'm not giving her a drop for it, all those things, right, yeah. So, being intentional, thinking ahead of time, what do I need in order to be nourished? I need to not have a fight with my cousin on Thanksgiving, yeah, right. And from that, how do I want? 

Marie (Host)

to handle it. I love how that translates instead of you know any type of specific response you're looking for from that cousin, instead of trying to control their behavior, it's about your need to not experience the fight and how we can control. Always right, it's always 50, 50. It's always a dance right, but we always control our half of the dance Right and I love always yes. Yeah, what do I want to create? 

Maggie (Guest)

Yeah, and that's how we make an idea a real thing. Right, Like the idea was, like, I want to enjoy it. How do I make it a real thing? We're laughing around the table instead of fighting around the table. 

Marie (Host)

So good, all right. So, everybody out there, just picture for yourself what do I want to create, and whatever that relationship is, whether it's with family, siblings, marriage this has been a through line of this whole conversation with Maggie is what do I want to create, both the positive outcome I'm going for and what can I control. So good, Maggie, what we always like to end I could talk to you forever, and I know that going beyond, going too long in an interview is not what my listeners enjoy the most. They like these, like you know, 40 minutes. So, what we always like to end with, what is the idea that you are working on turning into a real thing right now? 

Maggie (Guest)

Oh, that's such a good question. What is the idea? I'll tell you one that I just did. So, it's not the one I'm working on, but I just did it and I wanted to become a person who flossed. And you would think that this would be. 

You know, I'm a highly educated, professional, business-winning woman and I probably am somewhere on the spectrum where, like becoming a person who flossed was a very difficult thing that I really wanted to do and had a really hard time doing. And what I found out about myself and that I think is actually useful for everyone listening, is I didn't change the goal, I changed the method, and that helped me make take something that was felt so far away and so impossible that I tried and failed for years to do, and I so I used to use like regular floss like a string, and then I was in Whole Foods one day and there was this little thing that has like a little plastic handle and I'm like I'm going to try that and now I'm a person who flosses and I was like, wait, I changed the method, not the goal, and that was the key. So, there you go. 

Marie (Host)

Well, all right, and that's like so okay, the method and not the goal, and I love that you chose that and not like another book that you're writing. That's so awesome. All right, Maggie. Is there anything else that you want everyone else to know before we wrap up? 

Maggie (Guest)

I want everyone else to know that we deserve to have relationships we love being in at work, at home, in our projects, whatever it is that we're doing. And when we're in relationships that we don't love being in, we have agency and power to see if we can love being in them and we can get to decide how to either redraw the relationship, release the relationship or amplify the relationship. So good. 

Marie (Host)

Redraw, release or amplify, yeah, so good. If the people who are listening now, like so many of us, have completely fallen in love with you in the course of this podcast and just want more of our Maggie, what do they do? 

Maggie (Guest)

OK, they can go to Maggie Reyes dot com. Reyes. Maggie Reyes dot com. You can see whatever I'm up to there. You can join my email list. You can get updates about whatever I'm doing. That's the best place to go. 

Marie (Host)

All right, we will see you there. Thank you so much for spending this time with all of us. Maggie, I learned so much as I always do every single time that I talk to you, and I'm so grateful that everybody out there listening that all my bloomies got to hear from you too, got to know you and check Maggie out y'all you know. Go to her website and also, I highly recommend this book. If you like to have fun talking through things with your partner or other people, of course, in your life. You want to have questions that just deepen the relationship and give you something that you don't have to pull from your own brain to talk about, that can last all night in a conversation question for couples. The journal 400 questions to enjoy, reflect and connect with your partner is Maggie's book and I highly recommend it. All right, Maggie, thank you so much for being here. 

Maggie (Guest)

Thank you and thank you everyone for listening with us. 

Marie (Host)

All right, that's what we got for you, and we will see you next week. 

Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.