Episode 20 – Wife on Purpose: Part 2

‘s Up, Bees?!

Remember how – in Episode 11 – I promised that I’d read excerpts of my book WIFE ON PURPOSE aloud on the podcast?

Well… it’s that time again.

We’re reading from Hexagon Side One today.

Why Hexagon?

Because that’s the shape that Bees use to build their hives. It’s the most efficient way to fill up space and the way hexagons fit together naturally means that Bees have to use very little stickiness to keep the Hexagons bonded together.

Nice. Work. Bees.

The chapters in Wife on Purpose give you six suggestions for how to create your own six-sided hexagon of efficiency so that you can enjoy the most out of your marriage with an efficiently placed amount of effort.

Everyone knows that marriage is work. But does anyone really know what kind?

Bees do.

And I only want you doing the kind of work that’ll make your marriage better.

None of the fluff.

I really do want to make it as easy as possible for you to hear the ideas presented in WIFE ON PURPOSE so you can thoughtfully consider where the suggestions match your personal marriage vision.

I want to make it super simple for you to choose the concepts that reflect your values and then run with those concepts all the way to the marriage you imagined when you said “I do”.

There WILL be a full audio version of the book available in the near future – but it’s not ready yet and it’s okay that it isn’t.

Why?

Couple reasons

First, your free Ecopy of the book is already waiting for you at www.candicetoone.com/resources

And second, I’m going to read you an excerpt from Hexagon Side One – right here, right now – and then I’ll read you a little bit more of the story every 10th episode moving forward to give you a feel for what being a Wife on Purpose is all about.

That should tide you over until the full audio book version rolls out.

I wrote Wife on Purpose because I’ve coached through hundreds of sessions with all kinds of clients from ALL over the world.

Through conversations with women from all walks of life and all lengths and styles of relationships, I came to identify a handful of themes that – no matter what – make marriage harder.

I want to make sure YOU’RE clear on what those poisonous patterns are so you can watch for and avoid them as often as possible

ALSO I’m here with my book to help you look for easy opportunities to do USEFUL things that’ll make a big shift in the way you relate to your guy.

Of course, NONE of the themes are universal and there will be variation in how the themes show up in your relationship.

Your job is to hear what’s being offered, take the parts that hit home for you and use the ideas to create a marriage you love to live in.

You in?

Good.

Now on to the reading…

Hexagon side one, page 12.

Full Disclosure. If I hadn’t chosen life coaching as my career, I likely would have bailed on the process of examining my mind long ago.

This stuff ain’t easy.

It’s tough coming face to face with yourself and all that you’ve created. Rooting out the limiting beliefs that lead you to feel hopelessly trapped can be tricky, stinky work. The rewards are surely worth it, but the ride can be pretty rough.

When I first started digging around in my brain, I doubted that these methods would work to heal wounded marriages. No way you could convince me that one person doing the work tirelessly and on her own, could change the tone of an entire relationship.

Admittedly, it does take a great deal of trust in God, the universe and Mother Earth or whatever it is that you believe in to open your vulnerabilities and loosen your grip on the story you’ve been telling for most of your marriage. It’s a bit unnerving to consider that something new could be true.

You probably started up the self help type of study because you were hurting or dissatisfied in some way. Know that it’s common for some flavor of fear to pop up as women embark on a purposeful exploration of their marriages. It usually sounds like:

What if it’s like this forever?
What if I end up alone?
Maybe we screwed things up beyond any hope of repair.

Don’t you feel scared just listening to those sentences? Imagine thinking them all day long. Maybe you’re already thinking thoughts like those all day long. Yikes. And here’s the rub. When you feel scared, it’s natural to crave everything working in a predictable, familiar way that makes perfect sense to you.

It’s not that you’re being bratty or inflexible. It’s more than when you’re already feeling heightened and terrified, introducing the scary unknown on top of the uncertainty and helplessness that already exists seems like a terrible idea.

It seems preferable to stick with what you’ve always believed. Even when what you’ve always believed looks nothing like what you want the truth to be. Even when what you’ve always believed is incredibly painful.

Scared people as a general rule aren’t great at trust, not in their loved ones, not in the process and not in themselves. Especially not in themselves.

Most of the wives I work with are pretty used to sacrificing themselves in order to care for someone else. Women are taught to believe that our value comes in what we can offer to others. So making ourselves available around the clock seems like what we’re supposed to do.

Under the mantle of family nurturer, women often require themselves to bend and twist and stretch and give often close to the point of breaking. They attend to themselves as an afterthought if they attend to themselves at all.

For many of us all, that just seems normal. Plus, society rewards women for caring in this way. We call them righteous and charitable and noble when they do, and it’s not all bad. There are definitely some perks that go along with selfless service – but moderation in all things. Am I right?

When your only focus is the well being of others, your self trust erodes without you even noticing. If you expect yourself to smile and make the best of it while your soul is dissolving, your inner self learns that you’re more likely than not to ignore her needs. Ignored needs breed resentment and resentment destroys relationships, especially since we sometimes expect our husbands to notice our needs and carve out resources to meet them.

Husbands are almost always pretty bad at that. Why? Because they are also terrible mind readers. And even though it seems like it should be, mind reading is not a skill that improves with time or proximity. So whether you’ve been married five years or 67 years, my guess is you’ll still have to tell your husband directly if you want or need something in particular.

I’ll pause while your brain tells you what a bummer that is. Maybe so.

But it could also be a huge relief for both of you to clearly communicate about what’s going to keep your marriage happily humming along.

So let’s talk about telling the truth to you and him. Even when it’s hard.

I’m pretty confident that you’re already very good at telling the truth. My guess is that you’re not likely to purposely deceive anyone in your life. I also know that many of us fall victim to “Christmas sweater” mentality. We smile and pretend that we like something even when we don’t. Because we really don’t want the other person to feel bad.

Challenge is when you force yourself to do what you think is protecting other people’s feelings, you’re no longer paying attention to your own.
Telling the truth from a place of love opens up room for everyone’s feelings to matter, including yours.

So how can I tell the truth and consider all the feelings involved? Glad you asked.

I imagine you’ve heard Carl Douglas’ song Kung Fu Fighting. If not, you’re welcome to put this down for a bit and find it on YouTube. I’m happy to wait.

When you listen, you’ll hear the line “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting”.

For decades, most people accepted that lyric as a plausible truth. No one really bothered to check the validity of this claim. We all just went with Douglas’ assertion and danced along.

Years after I heard that first song, I saw a T-shirt printed with the graphic: “Surely not EVERYONE was Kung Fu Fighting” across the front.

When I read the shirt, I laughed out loud and I bought it immediately.

This is the essence of telling yourself the truth. Start by noticing on purpose when something is generally accepted as true and then poke around in that line of thinking to see whether it serves you or not to go on believing it.

For example,
caring husbands remember the details of their wife’s week
bills should be paid as soon as they are received
good grades are better
my parents should be welcomed into our home during the holidays

It all sounds lovely. Like a beautiful picture of the way the best marriages go. But it’s all poison.

Because when your husband forgets about your doctor’s appointment or complaints about how long your mother is staying at Thanksgiving, it feels like something has gone wrong. Like your marriage is less connected or less successful in some way because none of it is going the way it was supposed to.

So painful to look at the life you built with a man you chose in that way. Without conscious supervision, our brains cook up wonderful sounding expectations. And when those expectations aren’t met? Tragedy. Disappointment. Hurt. Doubt.
Fortunately, there’s another way. Telling yourself the whole truth makes it possible for you to get a leg up on the unconscious programming that was bred into your brain as you watched movies, read books, listened to songs and paid attention to the relationships around you.

Becoming conscious of your previously unquestioned expectations helps you decide if you really want to keep the rules you have for him for yourself and for your marriage.

You don’t have to make those decisions from a place of dejected resignation. You can do it from a place of purposeful curiosity and genuine fascination for the complex husband you’ve chosen to accompany you on this adventure we call married life.

This is usually the part where women say something like: “So I’m just supposed to have no expectations of him at all?! He can just do whatever. And that’s it?!”

I get why women ask that.

And no, that’s not what I’m saying.

I actually think the healthiest thing you can do for your marriage is to get super extra crystal clear about your expectations and your preferences for how you want everything to go.

When you really know what your preferences and expectations are. It is 1 million times easier to tell the truth about them. Then, remind yourself that all of your preferences and expectations are just optional beliefs that you’ve adopted, like lyrics you’ve heard over and over.

Surely not everyone was Kung Fu Fighting.

Some people – probably a lot of people – were, but others weren’t. Some people were plugging their ears. Other people were doing yoga or sleeping. Still others are back in the kitchen making cookies, completely oblivious to the whole dance fight party thing going on in the streets.

There are lots of approaches to married life. The key is to find, then live from the ones that get you to the marriage that you want to have. And all of that rests on a commitment to telling the truth to you. And to him.

If you want some more help finding a focus as to what you are willing to consciously and purposely pick up and take in to your life – you HAVE to take the FREE course: “How to have the marriage your imagined when you said “I do”.

I’ll give you three simple steps to change the entire trajectory of your marriage.

It’s easier than you think and I’ll be with you to support you as much as you want me to be.

I guarantee you’ll walk away from the course with at least one actionable tool that you can easily implement right away to make your marriage more of what you want it to be.

Only thing you’ve got to lose is loneliness and disappointment.

And you didn’t want those things anyway.

So snag the FREE course off my website – use the gold button on the upper right of candicetoone.com.

Choose courage, Bees – and keep on flying!