October 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Dr. Doug welcomes Eri Kardos to explore how we can transform our relationships by unlearning old patterns and embracing emotional growth. From her journey at Amazon to becoming a global relationship coach, Eri shares her 4 Cs model and the power of conscious love to heal, connect, and thrive in both personal and professional life.
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Inspire Vision Podcast is broadcast on K4HD Radio (www.k4hd.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com).
Inspire Vision Podcast TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Inspire Vision Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek
(00:22):
the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any
suggested ideas.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
At the end of the day, it's not about what
you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what
you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up,
who you've made better. It's about what you've given back.
Denzel Washington, Welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is
to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you
(00:51):
to do the same.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Ery, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Hello, doctor Doug. Such a pleasure to be here with you.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Oh, it's great to have you here. Just share with
the audience. I know it. But where are you living?
Speaker 4 (01:03):
You can't tell of my background, but I'm actually based
in Bali, Indonesia. And it is a beautiful sunny day here.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Oh that's wonderful, and it's a beautiful hot sunny day here.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
We're so close Thailand and Bali, so close.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I know, it's amazing. So anyway, I'm really looking forward
to this. I think it's going to be a fun
conversation for the folks. I'd love for you to kind
of share your journey because you've written a book, You've
obviously done a lot of things, but I always find
it interesting to find out what brought you to this
(01:37):
point in doing what you're doing.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean, we could spend all day telling that story,
but I'll give the summary memories. I'm actually from the US,
originally from Michigan and was raised there, lived all over
the world, all of the United States. I would say,
just in generally been really fascinated by personal development my
whole life. I got my first COATR mental or when
I was sixteen years old and just have continued on
(02:03):
that path for a long time. I had a lot
of interesting life experiences that took me all over, including
joining the Air Force ROTC on a dare and then
deciding to run a youth hostel in Boston and ended
up getting my MBA from the world's number one international
business school, and then being hired by Amazon dot Com
to do leadership development, and so it was my path
(02:25):
was kind of all over the place, and at the
same time it made sense to me at the time.
And throughout this whole process, I've just continued to really
peek out on love and relationships and how do these
things work and why are they so hard? And I've
worked with therapists and coaches all the world just trying
to figure out my own like what is this thing?
(02:46):
And my parents taught marriage classes in their church they
still do to this day. Yeah, so it's been a
big part, a big theme of my life. And when
I was at Amazon, I just, you know, it's like
I just started noticing that as time and trust was
established with my executives, that they would start opening up
to me about more things going on in their personal lives.
And my undergraduate degrees in sexual psychology. They started asking consent, hey,
(03:09):
would you be okay with me talking to you about
what's happening at home too, because I think they're connected,
and many said yes. What I noticed was that when
we put more attention on what's happening at home and
matters of the heart, there's a really big shift. It
was like these really successful people who would climb the
corporate ladder and done amazing things academically, they didn't learn
(03:29):
I would say, we didn't learn. We most humans didn't
learn how to really love in a way that's that's
going to get us the love that we desire. We
didn't learn great communication skills. We didn't learn great active
listening skills. They didn't learn how to be with our
emotions or how to handle conflict. And these are what
it takes to really have amazing, juicy, peaceful, enlivening relationships.
(03:51):
So when I started focusing on these matters of the heart,
whether they were single or in partnership, I'd watched these
leaders come back to work with more drive and focus
and inspiration and happiness. It would just ripple out into
their teams, and I watched entire organizations change. You're focusing
more on the bedroom than the boardroom. A lot an
impact in the boardroom. And I was like, this is amazing,
(04:11):
this is so fun, and it is so interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I know that when I was working with some small businesses,
it was fascinating to see how and as you say,
you know, I would say, look the principles we're going
to talk about here, Because I got a lot into
the human behavior part of it. You know, whatever it
is here, it's going to be at home, or whatever
it's at home, it's going to be here. And as
you start to change it, it's amazing to see the results.
(04:38):
So I love that. What brought you to writing your book? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
So, so here I am at Amazon doing this thing.
Find it way more rewarding to talk about the whole
person instead of just the org. And what I discovered
was that soon I started getting referred. So next thing
I know, I'm working at Amazon doing leadership development by day,
and by nights and weekends, I'm coaching executives that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Relativity, SpaceX, Boeing,
(05:05):
doing Hollywood actors. I'm like, Wow, what is going on?
This is a real area of need, Like people's hearts
really want to learn these things, and they want to
feel supported and feel safe in the vulnerability and keeping
the professionalism. So like, this is awesome. How can I
keep doing this? I decided to quit my job at
Amazon and start touring the world speaking and in one
(05:26):
year I've spoken six different continents. And what I found
was that there's just such a hunger for this globally.
So I decided to continue to stay out of Amazon
and start my own company, which is called Reader and Love.
And I wrote my best selling book called Relationship Agreements.
And then from there, I'm like you, I have a
copy right here. So this is my book, Relationship Agreements,
(05:46):
and now it's on audible. My husband and I recorded
it about a year and a half ago together, and
then from there just things kept on blossoming, and I
just thought, this is my this is my purpose, this
is my path, like running really in love and helping
people learn how to love differently and being a mom.
And so those are the two big things I focus
my life on. And then this passed but a month ago,
(06:10):
now almost a month ago. When this comes out, I'll
be many many months old. But when about a month
ago I got a chance to walk onto the ted
X stage and it was such an amazing experience and
to share my heart and some tools that I really
believe in for changing the world and how we turn
conflict into connection. So it's been a ride and I
love it. I'm so blessed. And here we are not
(06:33):
going to talk great.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Here we are well, and you know what's interesting, and
it sounds like you are extremely fortunate because of your parents.
You know, when I look at and you know, we
talk about divorce rates all over and I'm not sure
how it is worldwide, but I think it's at least equal,
if not worse, if not worse, at least what I
see here in Thailand. But the thing that's interesting is
(06:58):
that there's children, and as we grow up into teenagers
and so forth, we're never taught really how to develop
that relationship, even how to choose the right person that's
going to be in a relationship with us and with
us with them, and so often we see all of
these choices being made that ultimately don't last for more
(07:22):
than a year to five years or whatever that happens
to be. What's your thoughts on how can we as
parents help our children to start to learn more effectively
number one, how to choose a partner, and number two,
how to be able to maintain that relationship in a
healthy way.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
I love these questions. I love that we're looking at
intergenerational and not just right now, and it's all connected. Right,
So first of all, let me let me back up
to the moment and just say this question that I
asked almost every class I teach which is I asked,
We'll just pause, and I want you to count how
many happy, healthy, long term cups you actually know, and
(08:01):
you can define that however you want. What is happy
to you, it is healthy to you, is long term
to you. And what I find is that in over
ninety percent of all my classes I've taught everywhere in
the world, ninety percent of people are somewhere between zero
and three couples total. Right, we just don't have the models.
We don't know people who are actually doing this Disney thing, right,
(08:23):
and yet we're supposed to be good at it, and
we didn't learn how These are skills that we really
they were being developed at an early age, but we
didn't learn the skills. We learned these things that don't work,
and then we believe that we know them, and then
we're socially shamed if we try to get support, Like
if you go see a therapist or a coach, people
think there's something wrong with you. It's not like being
proactive learning how to play tennis or learn how to
(08:44):
start a business a business coach. It's like if you
go to a coach or a therapist, you're broken in somehow.
So we have to start shifting our mindset of we
didn't learn this, it's time to learn it. And then
there's this amazing, amazing organization that I love and I've
done with a little bit of work with called the
Gotman Institute. And the Gotman Institute are the world's leading
researchers on couples. And they've taken all this research now
(09:06):
and said, what do we do to influence the next
generation so they can have healthy, happy, long term relationships.
And the number one factor is teaching children how to
be with their emotions, like really how to be with
their emotions. And I say that as somebody who you know.
I even when I was going through my coaching certification.
(09:27):
I don't think I've admitted this too many times. But
when I was going through my coaching certification, I got
to the final exam, I took it, all of my
class passed, and I was put on probation for six
months because I was told that I'm trying to get
people to be happy too quickly. I'm not allowing people
to be seen in their pain and I and their
vulnerability and really go into it. And I was like, oh,
(09:49):
And I spent six months working on this and going
really deep in my own journey and noticing, wow, my
feelings as a child. My parents are amazing. I love
them so much. I'm so grateful to them. They didn't
have the tools that we now have access to around
like just validating experiences as a child and validing our
experience is now so much the time we're distracted or
(10:11):
we're shamed, or we're told it's okay, and it's not okay.
It's or to shut up, right, And so for me,
I just learned the strategy of if there's big pain,
if there's loneliness or sadness, all I gotta do is
jump over it, get to the happiness, just find it,
like you can just ignore it, right, And that invalidation
carries out in life. And if the how do we
show up and really allow ourselves to be with the
(10:32):
pain and the sadness and the joy and the ecstasy
and the anger whatever's there, not being afraid of the emotions,
but learning how to be with them and then get
the messages out of them, because I really believe emotions
are just messengers trying to tell us something really cool.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Well, and you know that that is so fascinating and
it's so true that you know, don't cry. Quit crying.
You know, as a child, you're really not allowed, for
the most part, to show your emotions, and to a
large degree is because as parents we were never taught
our emotions right. And so you know, if we could
(11:06):
help the adults to understand that, you know, what is
time to go through that transformative program whatever it is,
and learn to show your emotions and then from there
be able to allow your children to have their emotions
and to be able to discuss that. As I was
going through one of my certifications on coaching and talking
(11:29):
about relationships, one of the funny things that I always
remember about emotions was, you know, the fellow said, hey,
so here's something I never want you to do because
you may get a divorce, but it's something that you
really need to do. He says, when you get into
a situation where an event happens and all of a sudden,
your partner or your spouse is just for you asked
(11:52):
the question, all right, my dear, what emotion came up
to cause you to react this way? And you know,
it's like, okay, you're in trouble. But the reality is
and I have actually done that now, you know, but
first started Okay, here's the emotion that came up for me,
(12:15):
because I reacted too. But the reality is is to
be able to identify the emotion suddenly. Number one puts
the personal responsibility on the individual that's experiencing the emotion,
because for the most part, events do not have emotion,
they're non emotional. But then we apply based on our
perception and our experiences in life, you will create an
(12:39):
emotion that puts us into some type of situation. And
so you know, I find it's interesting as you talk
about it, helping parents understand that if they can learn
to experience their own emotions, then they can teach their
children to do the same thing. And as you say,
it's a generational thing, it may take one, two, three
(13:02):
generations for that to actually.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Occur maybe or might just be one like we are
seeing such a big shift. So we use in our home.
We use many different tools, but one of our favorites
to use the Gatman's tool called emotion coaching. And I
can give you a really quick modified version of it
just to get an idea in your head and think, okay,
what we can you do? What can we do with this?
And take it home and try it out. But you
(13:24):
can emotion coach. If you have children, you can also
emotion coach yourself, and even emotion coach you're beloved. It's
just really amazing. So there's four steps. The first step
is just witnessing, like what happened, Like like you were running,
you fell down, used to cut your knee and you're crying.
You know, like, okay, we're gonna witness this. Second, name
the emotions. What are you feeling like? Oh, you're feeling
sad and surprised and in pain. Okay, there's gonna empathize,
(13:47):
you know, talk what has it felt like for you
when you've fallen down and cut your knee? And if
you've never fallen down and cut your knee, that's okay.
What has it felt like when you have felt those
same emotional concoction of sad, surprise, garrett, and pain. All
felt that before. We can reallyst empathize with that, even
if it's something as simple as ah, when I feel
those things, it just sucks. That's enough. And then fourth,
(14:10):
is there anything you need? And this is where a
lot of people who love to problem solve, myself included,
can get tripped up. We try to just solve the
problem for them. But we need to go through all
four steps and let the emotions start moving, and then
people can solve their own problems. Most of the time,
we can also offer problem solving here. So do you
want a band aid? Do you want some snuggles?
Speaker 3 (14:29):
You know?
Speaker 4 (14:30):
Do I help solving that thing that made you run
in the first place? You know, we can offer it,
but we don't do it. And just these four steps,
I mean, there's a lot more nuance to it. But
when we start doing that for kids, we start doing
for ourselves in the moment, when we feel a big emotion,
it could be joy, it could be anger, whatever it
is we witness and when we're empathizing, we're empathizing with
that older part of ourselves. When else in life have
(14:51):
I felt this way? That's huge, It's I discovered so
much about myself. I'm like, ah, shoot, this is real.
This fight that I'm having my husband actually reminds me
of that time of my dead Shoot.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Oh, I know.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
It is so interesting how we can experience all of
that and have no clue that literally we are at
the effect of our emotions. We're at the effect of
those imprints that have occurred in our early childhood or
even generational through DNA that caused us to respond in
(15:27):
a particular way that may be so out of the
way that we would want to respond. Yes, and to
be able as you said, you know, I love the
fact as you recognize it and are aware of it.
Somehow that starts to take that away and it starts
to calm it down.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Yeah. Yeah, And just recognizing that we all have our
trauma responses and having a trauma response isn't bad, right,
We all have trauma. Might just put it out there.
We all trauma, and we all have these trauma responses,
even though at least three of them most people, it's
like fight, flight, freeze, and the last one is spawning
or fixing or people pleasing. Right, It's like if I
just say or do the right thing, the situation will stop.
(16:07):
They all have these and it's okay. But what is
really tripping up most of the world, I think, and
causing a lot of conflicts and a lot of disconnect
between parents and their kids, between beloveds, between you know,
between best friends, even anybody we're close to. It's like
we get in these situations where our trauma response is
overriding everything, and we don't know how to be with it.
And when we go into a trauma response the fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
(16:31):
Our other person is going into their trauma response too.
Oftentimes they take it so personally that you're doing this,
and they believe the situation is about this old is
not about the old memory their experience, and they really
believe the situation is a personal attack on them. So
now both people are trying to protect themselves in these
trauma responses, and there's no way to have a calm, connected,
(16:54):
logical way out when you're both I call it in
the sandbox right when you're both in this response. But
we can actually learn how to take turns. We can
learn how to be in a trauma responsible of hurting
somebody else. We can learn how to not take things
personally and just love on that person where they are
and help them get back out of the sandbox and
on the bench. I like to say, so it's like,
(17:14):
how do we bring them back to being in their grounded,
healthy selves when you don't feel so flooded anymore, so
triggered anymore. And from that place, you guys can really
make some healing progress and be medicine for each other
instead of poison and have so cool well.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And you know, I mean, I don't know if you
see what's going on back in the US all the
I try to anger and so forth. I was just
reading an article about Supreme Court Justice Roberts who was
talking about the fact that you know what, here we
are in the Supreme Court, and each one of us
have our own ideas, and yes, sometimes we totally disagree,
(17:54):
but the point is is we need to learn to
work together and to understand each other. And although we
may disagree and vote a different way, that's so important.
And we see that going on in the US where
it has just become so aligned one way or the other,
and there's so much anger that's going on and so
much frustration. And you know, you talk about love, and
(18:18):
I love, you know, the relearn love, and I want
to get into that a little bit more. But something
that comes to my mind. I have a Christian background,
and one of the things that comes to my mind
and I always look at something and just kind of
tweak it a little bit, you know. So when Christ said,
you know, love God with all your heart, and second
commandment is like love your neighbors as yourself. You know,
(18:42):
everyone says, okay, so I got to love my neighbors
like I love me. But I look at that and going,
let's reverse that. You can't love your neighbors unless you
love yourself.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yes, And so when you talk about the four seas
of the relearned love model, and you talk about you know,
relearn you've got that spell. Interestingly, because if you look
at your website, you've got the R lower case E
than capital L E A R N. Why well, why
(19:11):
do you have it that way?
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Nobody's ever asked that before. But I love it. But
I really, I really feel like there's this lack of
understanding that you already learned love. You've already learned it,
and the way that you learned it is just I'm
tearing up. I'm tearing up just because I know what
people have lived through and what has been modeled for them,
and how how lacking that is of what is actually
(19:34):
possible for people. And it makes so much sense based
on the amount of hurt and loneliness and pain that
this world has gone through, that we are at a
place where we are so angry.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Now.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Anger is just a way of defending our boundaries, and
so it makes sense that we're like that. There's so
much anger right now. It's like, I don't feel safe.
People don't feel safe, and they don't feel heard. And
if we don't have the tools, excuse me, if we
don't have the tools to really go out there and
express ourselves and be heard and receive receive help, and
(20:04):
receive love, it's going to be harder and harder for
us to connect, and be easier and easier for us
to push love away and to push the port away
and push the connection away. So I just keep coming
back to this idea that if we all had a
little more compassion and grace with ourselves and understand that
our parents and caregivers are the best they could with
the tools they had, but what we learned is holding
(20:26):
us back from connection and from depth and from love
and from juiciness, it would change so much. Because it's like, Okay,
if you don't know how to ride a bike and
you want to learn how to ride a bike, they say, Okay,
I'm going to go learn how to ride a bike,
and you'd have so much grace and compassion with yourself
and in the learning process. But because we have this
idea that we're supposed to be good at this thing
that we're just not. We're not good. We didn't learn
(20:48):
the things that we're going to help us. In fact,
we learned things that are probably going to deter us
from getting what we want. It's the losing game we
were taught. How do we change the game and change
the rules that we get to have the love that
we desired? And that's where we have to relearn we
already learned. We have to kind of undo the mess
and relearn what's actually going to work that I think
we you know, going back to the model of Christ.
(21:09):
Christ already modeled this for us. We learned this, We
know this in our soul, how to love whether no
matter what your religious, spiritual beliefs are, I believe that
when we were born into this world we know how
to naturally love. We are such beautiful, tiny creatures who
just have nothing but love to give, and we lose
that over time because we see other things modeled for us.
(21:30):
So how do we come back to heart? How do
we come back to soul and find this? And this
is where the reallearn love model comes in, and we
have to choose to get curious first and say I
don't know what I don't know, maybe I maybe what
I know is actually not working. So let's get curious
and learn what actually works. Then we move into the
cultivating knowledge. This is where you're gonna learn what actually works.
This isn't a fluffy subject anymore. This is love. Is
(21:53):
something that's been so well researched. We have exact recipes
for how to naviate conflict, for how to be with
our emotions, or how to create connection that's meaningful. We
just have to learn it. And you have to find
the right fit for you, you know, like, not everyone's
going to want to work with me, and not everyone's
going to work with somebody else who has like a
doctor or a therapist. Doesn't mean they're good, and it
(22:15):
doesn't mean everybody fit for you, Like you got to
find the right fit. And then we move into after
you learn all the fun things right as a relationship
junkie and a personal development junkie. I love this learning phase.
I could be a student forever. But then we got
to have the rubber meet the road, right, you have
to move into sea if we change, and this is
where we're actually changing our way of being we're having accountability.
(22:36):
We're using the tools when it's hardest, when we go
into our trauma responses, when we want to go back
to how we saw our parents handle communication or conflict,
when we want to push our motion the way, this
is where we say no, no, no, no, no no, we're going
to change this. We're going to actually use the tools.
And then finally, when we do that, when we have
this new way of being, we get to then celebrate.
(22:57):
The fourth seas celebrate And it's so important because I
feel like most of us are living in a culture
where we're never good enough. It's never enough. There's something
broken with you. If you're single, there's if you get engaged,
is not enough until you're married. When you're married, it's
not enough. If you have kids, you have kids, right
It's like it never ending. It's never enough. You are
never enough, And we can't just be happy and be
(23:19):
in our current emotions right now and celebrate. So when
we go through that, we got curious, we cultivated knowledge,
we've changed, and when that change happens, those critical moments
and you choose not to fight the way you usually fight,
when you choose to feel in a way that you
feel scary and vulnerable, but you do it anyway. That's
when we celebrate, that really cements it into our body
of the This is the new way of loving and
(23:41):
that that I believe and not even believe. I see
it changing the world and I want that for everyone.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Okay, So I want you to just list now those
four seas because as you were talking about it, you
were using the words and like, all right, there's one seat.
There's one seat.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
So first one is get curious.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Curious, first curious, Okay, I get curious.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
To cultivate knowledge.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Number three change actually take the change. Yeah, and number
four is celebrate.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
All right, So you talk about communication a lot, and
you know, obviously communication is something that is probably the
least understood how to do it well, and yet it's
the most important thing in our lives is to be
able to learn to communicate. And so let's talk about
that a little bit as you look at what are
(24:32):
the challenges for people and their communication skills and how
do they improve communication at least from their point of view?
And then the second, the third question is if if
I change my communication skills, and am I going to
see a change in my wife's communication skills.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
Or I love your questions. Good, all right, So biggest
challenges in communication. Biggest challenges are we didn't learn how
to communicate, and there's so much good knowledge out there.
So Number one, I would say, learning how to listen
is one of the most incredible skills you will ever develop.
You don't if you are listening to me, and you
(25:17):
are or your partner or your child, if you're listening
to them right put that in quotes, and and you
are thinking of your response or how you're going to
defend yourself, or you're you know, or you're noticing other
things around the room, and you're not fully present and
really hearing what they're saying, and not just hearing but
you're starting to sense into the underlying feeling behind it.
(25:38):
You're not really listening, if you know, if you're not
getting your full attention, like eye contact and like nodding
your head and being present, you're not really listening and
they're not feeling listened to, they're not feeling heard. So
the number one we gathered how to listen. Number two,
we need to learn how to communicate in a way
the other person can receive us. I mean, I can
say I can just shout how I feel at somebody
(25:58):
doesn't mean they're going to get it. And so much
the time we feel like we're communicating because we're just
verbally vomiting, but the only person isn't receiving it, So
what's the point It's not being received. So we need
to make sure the message is getting through. And there's
so many beautiful skills we can learn around how to
do that. Some of them just being around how we
communicate presents. Some of them around how we invite people
(26:20):
into the conversations that are just throwing something at them.
You know, it's like, oh, my wife was stay in
the kitchen and I told her I was feeling. I'm like,
was she cooking? Was she able to give you her presence?
Did you stay it in a way that she was
going to receive you, or did you just like word vomit.
And you know, it makes such a big difference to
feel really heard. And on top of that, we can
(26:40):
learn about body language and about how do we create
a space to really talk. If we're trying to talk
in the middle of grocery shopping, it's probably not going
to be as well received as if we just say,
let's go to the park and sit down on a
bench and really like, give you to our full presents
and talk about this. Right, are you available for this conversation?
This invitation is so big to emotionally prepare somebody to
(27:01):
have a drop in time, it changes from a dialogue
and every day dand or two like we're here, really
really here to hear each other and learn. And then
I love this question. You know, I learned this question
from my husband. My husband, I have been married. This
will be our this ye'll be our tenth wedding. We
get married every year if we decide to get remarried.
Our commitment is not until death to us part. But
(27:21):
every year we tune back in and see how is
the health of our relationship and where is this going?
And he asked me this question, He's like, what does
it mean to you? And I have to say that
one question alone has changed the way I work with
my clients and with my kids, and with my husband's way.
I show up what does it mean to you? Because otherwise,
when I hear somebody speak, I have all sorts of
projections of what I think if they mean. But if
(27:43):
I drop in and say, but what does that mean?
To you, What is this thing that you want mean
to you? What? How do you what does this feeling
mean to you? It's a whole They have a whole
different life, they have a whole different lived experience. It's wild,
it's not mine. And I am so often surprised and
blown away by Wow, this is not what I thought
it was so truly being able to communicate and understand
(28:04):
something that's meaningful behind it, it's going to be one
of the most powerful things we can do, not just
in love, but in leadership and life. It's like whoa
if we can communicate so much as possible and get
off the text messages. I mean, there's a time and
a place for text messages, but we at the end
of the day, are we need to see each other's
facial expressions. We need to hear the changes in the
(28:25):
tone of voice. We need to see how our skin
changes color, or our breathing changes based on what's being said.
There's so much information that's nonverbal that we need to
see that we're losing touch with by doing internet dating,
by doing texting all the time. To handle communication like
we need to come back to the art of being
in connection well.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And you know, I love what you talked about there.
And you know when you talk about the first point
is listening, and I think you know, listening with understanding,
and you know, maybe for the audience. Just a good example,
as you were going through the four c's and I said, okay,
I want you to go through one more time, just
listening for me each time. And as you say, our
(29:06):
perceptions are so different, is it would be so interesting
for us to be able to listen to what someone
is saying and then ask questions say Okay, I'm not
quite sure I understand what you meant by that. And
that's where you're talking about getting into their reality and
really understanding. And then, as you say, and I love
this part, as you then respond to them, the question
(29:29):
is is how are you responding? And you know, as
you say, you've got your body language, you've got your words,
you've got your tonality, and all of those things can
affect the way that they perceive how you're communicating with them. Yes, much,
so much, so much, you know, and I tell this
story too, and I laugh about it. You know, I
(29:51):
get into the personality profiling and all of that type
of stuff. So I happen to be very much. And
you know, yeah, anyway, a combination of introvert and extrovert
left bring totally left ring. Okay, And so you know,
my kids for a while they're going dad, you know,
I realized, okay, so I learned I had and I
(30:13):
learned this when I was going through some programs. So
I now stop with my kids as we get into
communication and they're asking me a question, I said, all right,
I want to know. Do you want me just to
listen or do you want my opinion? Yeah? And you
know I had to do that because they felt like
I was criticizing them when I honestly was loving them
(30:34):
and trying to offer quote sage advice.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Because you're your wise dad, I get it.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
And now now it's like and we laugh about it.
It's like, all right, you want me to listen or
do you want my opinion? And a lot of times here,
d I just listener? No, No, I really would appreciate
your opinion. And I think that's come when they'd become
adults more. But I think it's so important first to
understand that, you know, we get into the personality types
and how we are, how we communicate, and understand that,
(31:04):
you know, what our body language, our words, how we
do it is so important and understanding how the other
individual wants to be communicated with and it's not the same.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
It's not the same.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah yeah, I mean for me, if someone talks and
talks and talks and talks and talks, it's like, just
get to the point. Just get to the point. Okay.
My daughter, who's more left brain extra, is like, let's talk,
let's talk, let's talk. You know, we'll be on the phone.
I'm going, okay, honey, it's time. Oh day, Okay, I'm
(31:38):
talking too much, right, go Yeah, And we laugh about it.
But the point is is that based on their personalities,
we talk the way we think we should talk, but
we don't understand that that's not maybe how the other
person wants to receive that communication.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
Yeah, And there's no right or wrong right, but it's
that awareness of these are two different persons. Thousand, where's
the win win for us? Like what is the sweet
spot where we both feel being heard and loved? And
that's that's the magic it Yeah yeah, okay, way to
go for you guys, figuring that out so.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Your opinion, you know, And and this happens all the time.
In relationships, when your partner triggers you, how do you
handle those emotions? What do you do? Now? I mentioned
a little bit of what I would do, but I'm
asking you when your partner, because obviously you've been married
ten years, you've got a great relationship. I'm sure you
have those triggers. Oh well, how do you handle that?
(32:34):
How do you handle those big emotions when you get
triggered by your partner, by your husband?
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Yeah, quick caveat. Of course I get triggered. Of course
he's triggered, Like we all get triggered. And even as
a relationship expert, I still am like I've got the tools,
and it's hard to use the tools all all the
time in the great way.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
So what do we do?
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Chapter five of my book is going to have really
clear like guidance of step by steps and stuff you
can do. Is going to have some really great stuff
on like way you can do stuff by step. There's
a lot of The important thing to know is that
everybody gets triggered, and that's okay. And one of the
greatest things you can do is just pause, give yourself
a chance to pause, to break the old pattern, the
(33:16):
old patterns you've been practicing for decades, so now we
either try something new. So whatever your whatever your trauma
response is, fye, flight, freeze, fawn, just pause. And I
love finding creative ways to do this and have some
fun and bring in some humor because we know that
there are some fights that are just going to be
unresolvable conflicts for the rest of your relationship and that's okay,
(33:37):
but we don't want these conflicts to be taken so
personally until last a week of disconnection or more. What
we wanted to do is get it down to the
situation arises, you feel the trauma coming in, you feel
the trigger coming in, the overwhelming is happening. You both
learn how to create a safe space for the pause
and go take care of yourselves for a moment, because
(33:58):
it's not about the situation. Like as you said, it's
not about the situation. So take a moment to pause,
go take a little bit of spaith and agree upon
what does that actually mean. Usually if about twenty minutes,
and here's what you're doing in that twenty minutes, we're
gonna just do with them. Checking in with our emotions.
You had emotion coach we did earlier. You can do
that with yourself, like what just happened? What am I feeling?
(34:19):
What is this reminded me of? And what do I
need right now? That's a great one. Just taking some
breaths or journaling can be really really helpful. But how
do you allow yourself to be with those emotions. I
love doing it, like being my body more. I really
believe our body holds a lot of tension and trauma.
So you know, doing some of the breathing and jumping
and shaking, or hit some pillows. We have. We have
pillows in all of our house and when whenever we
(34:41):
have big emotions, like our kids know, we're gonna go
to the pillows and we're all gonna just hit pillows
together just to move some of the energy and then
we can think more clearly because you feel at charge.
Right It's like some people are like I want to
hit something like great, then go hit a pillow. Don't
hurt yourself, don't hurt anybody else, Just go hit a pillow.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Great, you know?
Speaker 4 (34:57):
Or I want to scream, great, cover your hand into
a pillow, into your cover your mouth with your hands,
or cover your mouth with a pillow and just scream
for a minute. Like, trust your body that it wants
to move this and once it's moved in a way
it's not hurting anybody else, then e motion coach yourself.
Then just breathe and think about when have I felt
this before. It's reminding you of something from your past,
(35:19):
and that's where the golden nuggets of information are of
you know, in my path, this is how people would
respond to me. This is how lonely I felt, with
how angry I felt, and here's what I really am craving,
here's what I really want, And you can start to
learn how to ask for what you want and take
ownership of Shoot, babe, like I know we were in
this fight, and I know that you just wanted. Like
(35:41):
my husband and I have this example of hot sauce,
Like I ended up buying him dinner one night and
getting getting not enough hot sauce for him, and he
felt not considered, which is his big story of Oh,
it just pulses through his life. He's not considered enough, right, right,
and so then he doesn't feel consiirt because I didn't
get enough hot sauce, which was just the right. Life happens.
(36:01):
And for me, my big woe is me story through
my whole life. We call the core wound is I'm
not good enough. So as soon as he goes into
I'm not considering, I'm like, oh, I'm not good enough.
I didn't get enough hot sauce. Right. It is always,
not always, but almost always these same big underlying stories
that I have felt since I was a little girl,
and he just felt since he was a little boy.
(36:22):
And right now we're making it about the situation, but
it's not. And I can come back and say, Babe,
you know I wanted to fight you on this, but
I see I'm just feeling not good enough. Can you
can keep you be medicine for me instead of like
rareling into this disconnect. Can you just tell me that
I'm good enough even when I made a mistake And
he's like, yeah, can you just tell me that you
actually were considering me and he didn't forget about me. Yeah,
(36:43):
I am considering you. I was thinking about you, and
I am so sorry that I didn't know to get
that extra hot sauce. And this is where we get
to build connection instead of having the old wounds just
perpetuate and perpetuate and become more and more poisonous.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Well, and you know, you brought up something else that
I think is so important and I experienced this. You know,
you get into you get into the situation where you're
not happy with each other, and as you say, you
go and beat pillows, and I can imagine what happens
your kids watch you. You're watching each other, and all
of a sudden that anger turns into laughter.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Oh my gosh, you know what pillow bites we have.
It's ridiculous, you.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Know, And so it's so fascinating if you can find
ways that you can do that. I know that we watch,
you know, we watch a lot of movies that you know,
kind of this kind of stuff, fighting and so forth.
And every once in a while, after we've had some
kind of trauma going on there, we kind of look
(37:43):
at each other. We put our fists up and we
go back and forth like that and we start to
laugh and it's over. It's over. So to be able
to bring humor and laughter ultimately, find find ways to
do that, And you know that takes a conscious effort.
And I know you talk a little bit about conscious relationships,
(38:03):
and I'd love for you to just to kind of
talk a little bit about that. The conscious relationship and
how do you have those relationship agreements? And obviously and
as we get closer to the end, I'd love for
you to talk about conscious relationships and how do we
do that.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Yeah, So, in general, the idea is most people stop
being intentional about their relationships after they say I do,
And I just want to invite into the idea that
there's so much more possible and if we tune into
what is it that we really want, even in the
first dating phase when you know you guys are creating
a partnership, what is your foundation, like, what do we
(38:44):
want to be? And so my book Relationship Agreements is
all about how we take these assumptions and expectations instead
of having them stay out there, we talk about them
and we write them down. I love Google docs, super
easy to edit. You know, it's a living document. It's
going to change and evolve over time. You're going to
be different six months from now, They're going to be
different from six month monthsrom now. Your relationship is gonna
(39:04):
be different six months from now. So letting it evolve
over time and talking about okay, well, what do we
really want and why what does it mean to us?
And that could be everything from how we handle finances
to how we handle conflict, to how we communicate. Maybe
it's really important for me to get a good morning
and a good night text from you, and that's really
like something that's meaningful for me. Can we just agree
(39:25):
to that instead of me getting pissed off when you
don't send me that? Right, because you can know, or
our roles and responsibilities are on the house, or how
we're going to parent, or how are we going to
continue to invest in our intimacy and explore together? Right, Like,
all these things are things I think people take for granted,
and we develop these recipes that feel really comfortable but
(39:47):
stagnate over time. So instead of letting things stagnate, how
do we continue to choose, lean in, and choose to
evolve together. This is conscious relating and I really believe
you can create whatever you want from this space. And
when things aren't working anymore, you say this is not
working for anymore? What do we need to shift? And
we create a new agreement and then we can move
forward that new agreement and there's so much freedom and
(40:08):
safety in it, it's wild. So that is really what
I invite people to do, is create a blank canvas
and create the relationship you want and allow it to evolve.
Maybe check in once a quarter, you know, whatever feels
right for you, go on a little vacation or vacation
somewhere and to be like, how are we doing? Is
there any friction points? Am I noticing judgment towards you?
(40:29):
Or am I feeling judged by you or about this situation?
If there's that friction point, this is when we begin
the realer and love model again. This is when we
get really curious because there's this judgment and we're going
to go get the tools we need to move through
this and create a new way of being. We're going
to actually start using the tools, and we're going to
celebrate because it's really fun to celebrate that we're evolving together.
We're a team. Oh my gosh, how cool is that?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
And it takes two.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
And it takes it really does.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Yeah, yeah, it takes to And I think that's important
for folks to understand that it does take too. But also,
and I don't know if you've seen this occur with
the people you've coached and so forth. Have you found
when you work with the one individual and they really
start to experience that self love, and as they start
to learn how to communicate, you find sometimes that their
(41:16):
partner suddenly starts to come along even without doing any
of the coaching.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Yeah, and I know you you asked a question earlier
about like if I start using these communication tools with
my partner, So I didn't really speak into that. But
it's not always. Sometimes people get in partnerships where one
person is really focused on growth and development and this
is important to them, and that a person is so
happy just in life as they are and they don't
need anything more or they don't want anything more, because
(41:44):
it's probably more like they don't want. This can be
a really difficult combination in partnership, super hard. I imagine
like there's somebody driving a Ferrari and is ready to go,
and the other person feels like they're being dragged behind
the Ferrari, and then nobody feels great. We want to
be as a team together, in the driver's seat together,
and so many people just need the invitation to see
(42:07):
what else is possible because their nervous system, their lived
experience hasn't had any evidence yet that we can shift.
So if one person is making that shift, the other
person can see it and see that it's real. It's
not just some hokey thing they saw on a movie
or something that feels so distant. They're like, oh my gosh. Like,
if you're doing this and you're happier, I want to
(42:28):
bite that cake too. Can you share that? And all
of a sudden we have a new thing to talk about,
Especially if you're coming at it from a not a
higher than or a holier than thou standpoint, it's like, no,
this is who I am, and I'm so excited to
share with you. If you want to join me, you're
welcome to that invitation versus a versus a power dynamic.
It's really really beautiful, and I think that's where I
(42:49):
see the biggest shifts of It's okay if you're taking
a step on your own first, and see how they
respond with an invitation for them to try this too,
because it's just going to make life more fun, and
then see what happened, and if they still are not interested,
then there's something else to look at there.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, then you have to make some other heavy decisions.
But you know, it's interesting and I love what you
talked about. As far as you and your husband, how
you know every one and I don't know how often,
but you said, say, all right, how are we doing what?
You know, the fact that we do evolve, that we change,
and how can we how can we continue to be
(43:25):
together with those changes and work with each other and
understand that? To me, that that is such a key
element to a successful relationship.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Oh yes, I love that.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
So as we close, and you know we've talked about you,
you have gotten so much good information that you've shared
with us. What what would be kind of a final
message that you'd like to share with the audience.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
I just want to say that it is so possible
for you to learn a whole new way of loving
in a way that is going to set you free.
It's going to create freedom and safety for you to
be authentically yourself and still be loved, and for your
partner to be authentically themselves and still be loved. And
it takes courage and patience to lean into this idea
(44:14):
that you get to be a student again. We get
to you get to learn this thing that you've been
your heart has been creating that you know is possible,
You just need to learn how to do it. So
if you can lean into that and relearn Love everything
is possible.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Oh wonderful, wonderful, And how do the people talk a
little bit about your book again and how do they
find that? And then how do they find you?
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yeah, the easiest thing to do is go to Relearnlove
dot com. That is easiest place you're going to get everything.
You're going to find free masterclasses. You're going to find
paid programs where you can just do it yourself if
you want. You're going to find ways to work with me.
They're in a singles program or private coaching for singles
or people in relationship. You're going to find access to
(44:56):
the book and the audiobook. You're going to see a
link to my ted Talk everything is there, all these podcasts,
podcast will be on there. So we just want to
make it a one step shop of awesome resources. And
you can also go to Instagram which is at coach
Aery Kardosh and you're gonna have lots of wonderful things. Now.
If you sign up for like the free masterclass or anything,
(45:17):
you'll be on my email list. I love to connect
with people. Reach out to me if you have questions
or want any support, Like, I really am here to
make sure that the world gets the resources they need
to relearn love. And I'm just so grateful to be
on this, on this show with you, doctor Doug. Thank you,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Well and I appreciate it. Now, are you able to
go on to Amazon? Also?
Speaker 4 (45:35):
Yeah, so the book is on Amazon and Audible.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
So and yeah I love Audible me.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
Too, So you'll get to hear my voice. I actually
recorded it and my helped me with the other there's
a male voice in the in the book too, so
you get to hear both of our voices on it.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Wonderful. Hey, thank you so much. That is has just
been fantastic.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
So yeah, thank you doctor Doug. It's amazing. Have a
great day, and thank you everyone for tuning in.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
It means a lot, yes, and thanks folks, and I
hope you'll join us again soon. There's a doctor Doug saying, now,
mis day
This program is designed to provide general information with regards
to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek
(00:22):
the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any
suggested ideas.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
At the end of the day, it's not about what
you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what
you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up,
who you've made better. It's about what you've given back.
Denzel Washington, Welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is
to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you
(00:51):
to do the same.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Ery, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Hello, doctor Doug. Such a pleasure to be here with you.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Oh, it's great to have you here. Just share with
the audience. I know it. But where are you living?
Speaker 4 (01:03):
You can't tell of my background, but I'm actually based
in Bali, Indonesia. And it is a beautiful sunny day here.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Oh that's wonderful, and it's a beautiful hot sunny day here.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
We're so close Thailand and Bali, so close.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I know, it's amazing. So anyway, I'm really looking forward
to this. I think it's going to be a fun
conversation for the folks. I'd love for you to kind
of share your journey because you've written a book, You've
obviously done a lot of things, but I always find
it interesting to find out what brought you to this
(01:37):
point in doing what you're doing.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean, we could spend all day telling that story,
but I'll give the summary memories. I'm actually from the US,
originally from Michigan and was raised there, lived all over
the world, all of the United States. I would say,
just in generally been really fascinated by personal development my
whole life. I got my first COATR mental or when
I was sixteen years old and just have continued on
(02:03):
that path for a long time. I had a lot
of interesting life experiences that took me all over, including
joining the Air Force ROTC on a dare and then
deciding to run a youth hostel in Boston and ended
up getting my MBA from the world's number one international
business school, and then being hired by Amazon dot Com
to do leadership development, and so it was my path
(02:25):
was kind of all over the place, and at the
same time it made sense to me at the time.
And throughout this whole process, I've just continued to really
peek out on love and relationships and how do these
things work and why are they so hard? And I've
worked with therapists and coaches all the world just trying
to figure out my own like what is this thing?
(02:46):
And my parents taught marriage classes in their church they
still do to this day. Yeah, so it's been a
big part, a big theme of my life. And when
I was at Amazon, I just, you know, it's like
I just started noticing that as time and trust was
established with my executives, that they would start opening up
to me about more things going on in their personal lives.
And my undergraduate degrees in sexual psychology. They started asking consent, hey,
(03:09):
would you be okay with me talking to you about
what's happening at home too, because I think they're connected,
and many said yes. What I noticed was that when
we put more attention on what's happening at home and
matters of the heart, there's a really big shift. It
was like these really successful people who would climb the
corporate ladder and done amazing things academically, they didn't learn
(03:29):
I would say, we didn't learn. We most humans didn't
learn how to really love in a way that's that's
going to get us the love that we desire. We
didn't learn great communication skills. We didn't learn great active
listening skills. They didn't learn how to be with our
emotions or how to handle conflict. And these are what
it takes to really have amazing, juicy, peaceful, enlivening relationships.
(03:51):
So when I started focusing on these matters of the heart,
whether they were single or in partnership, I'd watched these
leaders come back to work with more drive and focus
and inspiration and happiness. It would just ripple out into
their teams, and I watched entire organizations change. You're focusing
more on the bedroom than the boardroom. A lot an
impact in the boardroom. And I was like, this is amazing,
(04:11):
this is so fun, and it is so interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
I know that when I was working with some small businesses,
it was fascinating to see how and as you say,
you know, I would say, look the principles we're going
to talk about here, Because I got a lot into
the human behavior part of it. You know, whatever it
is here, it's going to be at home, or whatever
it's at home, it's going to be here. And as
you start to change it, it's amazing to see the results.
(04:38):
So I love that. What brought you to writing your book? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
So, so here I am at Amazon doing this thing.
Find it way more rewarding to talk about the whole
person instead of just the org. And what I discovered
was that soon I started getting referred. So next thing
I know, I'm working at Amazon doing leadership development by day,
and by nights and weekends, I'm coaching executives that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Relativity, SpaceX, Boeing,
(05:05):
doing Hollywood actors. I'm like, Wow, what is going on?
This is a real area of need, Like people's hearts
really want to learn these things, and they want to
feel supported and feel safe in the vulnerability and keeping
the professionalism. So like, this is awesome. How can I
keep doing this? I decided to quit my job at
Amazon and start touring the world speaking and in one
(05:26):
year I've spoken six different continents. And what I found
was that there's just such a hunger for this globally.
So I decided to continue to stay out of Amazon
and start my own company, which is called Reader and Love.
And I wrote my best selling book called Relationship Agreements.
And then from there, I'm like you, I have a
copy right here. So this is my book, Relationship Agreements,
(05:46):
and now it's on audible. My husband and I recorded
it about a year and a half ago together, and
then from there just things kept on blossoming, and I
just thought, this is my this is my purpose, this
is my path, like running really in love and helping
people learn how to love differently and being a mom.
And so those are the two big things I focus
my life on. And then this passed but a month ago,
(06:10):
now almost a month ago. When this comes out, I'll
be many many months old. But when about a month
ago I got a chance to walk onto the ted
X stage and it was such an amazing experience and
to share my heart and some tools that I really
believe in for changing the world and how we turn
conflict into connection. So it's been a ride and I
love it. I'm so blessed. And here we are not
(06:33):
going to talk great.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Here we are well, and you know what's interesting, and
it sounds like you are extremely fortunate because of your parents.
You know, when I look at and you know, we
talk about divorce rates all over and I'm not sure
how it is worldwide, but I think it's at least equal,
if not worse, if not worse, at least what I
see here in Thailand. But the thing that's interesting is
(06:58):
that there's children, and as we grow up into teenagers
and so forth, we're never taught really how to develop
that relationship, even how to choose the right person that's
going to be in a relationship with us and with
us with them, and so often we see all of
these choices being made that ultimately don't last for more
(07:22):
than a year to five years or whatever that happens
to be. What's your thoughts on how can we as
parents help our children to start to learn more effectively
number one, how to choose a partner, and number two,
how to be able to maintain that relationship in a
healthy way.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
I love these questions. I love that we're looking at
intergenerational and not just right now, and it's all connected. Right,
So first of all, let me let me back up
to the moment and just say this question that I
asked almost every class I teach which is I asked,
We'll just pause, and I want you to count how
many happy, healthy, long term cups you actually know, and
(08:01):
you can define that however you want. What is happy
to you, it is healthy to you, is long term
to you. And what I find is that in over
ninety percent of all my classes I've taught everywhere in
the world, ninety percent of people are somewhere between zero
and three couples total. Right, we just don't have the models.
We don't know people who are actually doing this Disney thing, right,
(08:23):
and yet we're supposed to be good at it, and
we didn't learn how These are skills that we really
they were being developed at an early age, but we
didn't learn the skills. We learned these things that don't work,
and then we believe that we know them, and then
we're socially shamed if we try to get support, Like
if you go see a therapist or a coach, people
think there's something wrong with you. It's not like being
proactive learning how to play tennis or learn how to
(08:44):
start a business a business coach. It's like if you
go to a coach or a therapist, you're broken in somehow.
So we have to start shifting our mindset of we
didn't learn this, it's time to learn it. And then
there's this amazing, amazing organization that I love and I've
done with a little bit of work with called the
Gotman Institute. And the Gotman Institute are the world's leading
researchers on couples. And they've taken all this research now
(09:06):
and said, what do we do to influence the next
generation so they can have healthy, happy, long term relationships.
And the number one factor is teaching children how to
be with their emotions, like really how to be with
their emotions. And I say that as somebody who you know.
I even when I was going through my coaching certification.
(09:27):
I don't think I've admitted this too many times. But
when I was going through my coaching certification, I got
to the final exam, I took it, all of my
class passed, and I was put on probation for six
months because I was told that I'm trying to get
people to be happy too quickly. I'm not allowing people
to be seen in their pain and I and their
vulnerability and really go into it. And I was like, oh,
(09:49):
And I spent six months working on this and going
really deep in my own journey and noticing, wow, my
feelings as a child. My parents are amazing. I love
them so much. I'm so grateful to them. They didn't
have the tools that we now have access to around
like just validating experiences as a child and validing our
experience is now so much the time we're distracted or
(10:11):
we're shamed, or we're told it's okay, and it's not okay.
It's or to shut up, right, And so for me,
I just learned the strategy of if there's big pain,
if there's loneliness or sadness, all I gotta do is
jump over it, get to the happiness, just find it,
like you can just ignore it, right, And that invalidation
carries out in life. And if the how do we
show up and really allow ourselves to be with the
(10:32):
pain and the sadness and the joy and the ecstasy
and the anger whatever's there, not being afraid of the emotions,
but learning how to be with them and then get
the messages out of them, because I really believe emotions
are just messengers trying to tell us something really cool.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Well, and you know that that is so fascinating and
it's so true that you know, don't cry. Quit crying.
You know, as a child, you're really not allowed, for
the most part, to show your emotions, and to a
large degree is because as parents we were never taught
our emotions right. And so you know, if we could
(11:06):
help the adults to understand that, you know, what is
time to go through that transformative program whatever it is,
and learn to show your emotions and then from there
be able to allow your children to have their emotions
and to be able to discuss that. As I was
going through one of my certifications on coaching and talking
(11:29):
about relationships, one of the funny things that I always
remember about emotions was, you know, the fellow said, hey,
so here's something I never want you to do because
you may get a divorce, but it's something that you
really need to do. He says, when you get into
a situation where an event happens and all of a sudden,
your partner or your spouse is just for you asked
(11:52):
the question, all right, my dear, what emotion came up
to cause you to react this way? And you know,
it's like, okay, you're in trouble. But the reality is
and I have actually done that now, you know, but
first started Okay, here's the emotion that came up for me,
(12:15):
because I reacted too. But the reality is is to
be able to identify the emotion suddenly. Number one puts
the personal responsibility on the individual that's experiencing the emotion,
because for the most part, events do not have emotion,
they're non emotional. But then we apply based on our
perception and our experiences in life, you will create an
(12:39):
emotion that puts us into some type of situation. And
so you know, I find it's interesting as you talk
about it, helping parents understand that if they can learn
to experience their own emotions, then they can teach their
children to do the same thing. And as you say,
it's a generational thing, it may take one, two, three
(13:02):
generations for that to actually.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Occur maybe or might just be one like we are
seeing such a big shift. So we use in our home.
We use many different tools, but one of our favorites
to use the Gatman's tool called emotion coaching. And I
can give you a really quick modified version of it
just to get an idea in your head and think, okay,
what we can you do? What can we do with this?
And take it home and try it out. But you
(13:24):
can emotion coach. If you have children, you can also
emotion coach yourself, and even emotion coach you're beloved. It's
just really amazing. So there's four steps. The first step
is just witnessing, like what happened, Like like you were running,
you fell down, used to cut your knee and you're crying.
You know, like, okay, we're gonna witness this. Second, name
the emotions. What are you feeling like? Oh, you're feeling
sad and surprised and in pain. Okay, there's gonna empathize,
(13:47):
you know, talk what has it felt like for you
when you've fallen down and cut your knee? And if
you've never fallen down and cut your knee, that's okay.
What has it felt like when you have felt those
same emotional concoction of sad, surprise, garrett, and pain. All
felt that before. We can reallyst empathize with that, even
if it's something as simple as ah, when I feel
those things, it just sucks. That's enough. And then fourth,
(14:10):
is there anything you need? And this is where a
lot of people who love to problem solve, myself included,
can get tripped up. We try to just solve the
problem for them. But we need to go through all
four steps and let the emotions start moving, and then
people can solve their own problems. Most of the time,
we can also offer problem solving here. So do you
want a band aid? Do you want some snuggles?
Speaker 3 (14:29):
You know?
Speaker 4 (14:30):
Do I help solving that thing that made you run
in the first place? You know, we can offer it,
but we don't do it. And just these four steps,
I mean, there's a lot more nuance to it. But
when we start doing that for kids, we start doing
for ourselves in the moment, when we feel a big emotion,
it could be joy, it could be anger, whatever it
is we witness and when we're empathizing, we're empathizing with
that older part of ourselves. When else in life have
(14:51):
I felt this way? That's huge, It's I discovered so
much about myself. I'm like, ah, shoot, this is real.
This fight that I'm having my husband actually reminds me
of that time of my dead Shoot.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Oh, I know.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
It is so interesting how we can experience all of
that and have no clue that literally we are at
the effect of our emotions. We're at the effect of
those imprints that have occurred in our early childhood or
even generational through DNA that caused us to respond in
(15:27):
a particular way that may be so out of the
way that we would want to respond. Yes, and to
be able as you said, you know, I love the
fact as you recognize it and are aware of it.
Somehow that starts to take that away and it starts
to calm it down.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Yeah. Yeah, And just recognizing that we all have our
trauma responses and having a trauma response isn't bad, right,
We all have trauma. Might just put it out there.
We all trauma, and we all have these trauma responses,
even though at least three of them most people, it's
like fight, flight, freeze, and the last one is spawning
or fixing or people pleasing. Right, It's like if I
just say or do the right thing, the situation will stop.
(16:07):
They all have these and it's okay. But what is
really tripping up most of the world, I think, and
causing a lot of conflicts and a lot of disconnect
between parents and their kids, between beloveds, between you know,
between best friends, even anybody we're close to. It's like
we get in these situations where our trauma response is
overriding everything, and we don't know how to be with it.
And when we go into a trauma response the fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
(16:31):
Our other person is going into their trauma response too.
Oftentimes they take it so personally that you're doing this,
and they believe the situation is about this old is
not about the old memory their experience, and they really
believe the situation is a personal attack on them. So
now both people are trying to protect themselves in these
trauma responses, and there's no way to have a calm, connected,
(16:54):
logical way out when you're both I call it in
the sandbox right when you're both in this response. But
we can actually learn how to take turns. We can
learn how to be in a trauma responsible of hurting
somebody else. We can learn how to not take things
personally and just love on that person where they are
and help them get back out of the sandbox and
on the bench. I like to say, so it's like,
(17:14):
how do we bring them back to being in their grounded,
healthy selves when you don't feel so flooded anymore, so
triggered anymore. And from that place, you guys can really
make some healing progress and be medicine for each other
instead of poison and have so cool well.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And you know, I mean, I don't know if you
see what's going on back in the US all the
I try to anger and so forth. I was just
reading an article about Supreme Court Justice Roberts who was
talking about the fact that you know what, here we
are in the Supreme Court, and each one of us
have our own ideas, and yes, sometimes we totally disagree,
(17:54):
but the point is is we need to learn to
work together and to understand each other. And although we
may disagree and vote a different way, that's so important.
And we see that going on in the US where
it has just become so aligned one way or the other,
and there's so much anger that's going on and so
much frustration. And you know, you talk about love, and
(18:18):
I love, you know, the relearn love, and I want
to get into that a little bit more. But something
that comes to my mind. I have a Christian background,
and one of the things that comes to my mind
and I always look at something and just kind of
tweak it a little bit, you know. So when Christ said,
you know, love God with all your heart, and second
commandment is like love your neighbors as yourself. You know,
(18:42):
everyone says, okay, so I got to love my neighbors
like I love me. But I look at that and going,
let's reverse that. You can't love your neighbors unless you
love yourself.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yes, And so when you talk about the four seas
of the relearned love model, and you talk about you know,
relearn you've got that spell. Interestingly, because if you look
at your website, you've got the R lower case E
than capital L E A R N. Why well, why
(19:11):
do you have it that way?
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Nobody's ever asked that before. But I love it. But
I really, I really feel like there's this lack of
understanding that you already learned love. You've already learned it,
and the way that you learned it is just I'm
tearing up. I'm tearing up just because I know what
people have lived through and what has been modeled for them,
and how how lacking that is of what is actually
(19:34):
possible for people. And it makes so much sense based
on the amount of hurt and loneliness and pain that
this world has gone through, that we are at a
place where we are so angry.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Now.
Speaker 4 (19:44):
Anger is just a way of defending our boundaries, and
so it makes sense that we're like that. There's so
much anger right now. It's like, I don't feel safe.
People don't feel safe, and they don't feel heard. And
if we don't have the tools, excuse me, if we
don't have the tools to really go out there and
express ourselves and be heard and receive receive help, and
(20:04):
receive love, it's going to be harder and harder for
us to connect, and be easier and easier for us
to push love away and to push the port away
and push the connection away. So I just keep coming
back to this idea that if we all had a
little more compassion and grace with ourselves and understand that
our parents and caregivers are the best they could with
the tools they had, but what we learned is holding
(20:26):
us back from connection and from depth and from love
and from juiciness, it would change so much. Because it's like, Okay,
if you don't know how to ride a bike and
you want to learn how to ride a bike, they say, Okay,
I'm going to go learn how to ride a bike,
and you'd have so much grace and compassion with yourself
and in the learning process. But because we have this
idea that we're supposed to be good at this thing
that we're just not. We're not good. We didn't learn
(20:48):
the things that we're going to help us. In fact,
we learned things that are probably going to deter us
from getting what we want. It's the losing game we
were taught. How do we change the game and change
the rules that we get to have the love that
we desired? And that's where we have to relearn we
already learned. We have to kind of undo the mess
and relearn what's actually going to work that I think
we you know, going back to the model of Christ.
(21:09):
Christ already modeled this for us. We learned this, We
know this in our soul, how to love whether no
matter what your religious, spiritual beliefs are, I believe that
when we were born into this world we know how
to naturally love. We are such beautiful, tiny creatures who
just have nothing but love to give, and we lose
that over time because we see other things modeled for us.
(21:30):
So how do we come back to heart? How do
we come back to soul and find this? And this
is where the reallearn love model comes in, and we
have to choose to get curious first and say I
don't know what I don't know, maybe I maybe what
I know is actually not working. So let's get curious
and learn what actually works. Then we move into the
cultivating knowledge. This is where you're gonna learn what actually works.
This isn't a fluffy subject anymore. This is love. Is
(21:53):
something that's been so well researched. We have exact recipes
for how to naviate conflict, for how to be with
our emotions, or how to create connection that's meaningful. We
just have to learn it. And you have to find
the right fit for you, you know, like, not everyone's
going to want to work with me, and not everyone's
going to work with somebody else who has like a
doctor or a therapist. Doesn't mean they're good, and it
(22:15):
doesn't mean everybody fit for you, Like you got to
find the right fit. And then we move into after
you learn all the fun things right as a relationship
junkie and a personal development junkie. I love this learning phase.
I could be a student forever. But then we got
to have the rubber meet the road, right, you have
to move into sea if we change, and this is
where we're actually changing our way of being we're having accountability.
(22:36):
We're using the tools when it's hardest, when we go
into our trauma responses, when we want to go back
to how we saw our parents handle communication or conflict,
when we want to push our motion the way, this
is where we say no, no, no, no, no no, we're going
to change this. We're going to actually use the tools.
And then finally, when we do that, when we have
this new way of being, we get to then celebrate.
(22:57):
The fourth seas celebrate And it's so important because I
feel like most of us are living in a culture
where we're never good enough. It's never enough. There's something
broken with you. If you're single, there's if you get engaged,
is not enough until you're married. When you're married, it's
not enough. If you have kids, you have kids, right
It's like it never ending. It's never enough. You are
never enough, And we can't just be happy and be
(23:19):
in our current emotions right now and celebrate. So when
we go through that, we got curious, we cultivated knowledge,
we've changed, and when that change happens, those critical moments
and you choose not to fight the way you usually fight,
when you choose to feel in a way that you
feel scary and vulnerable, but you do it anyway. That's
when we celebrate, that really cements it into our body
of the This is the new way of loving and
(23:41):
that that I believe and not even believe. I see
it changing the world and I want that for everyone.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Okay, So I want you to just list now those
four seas because as you were talking about it, you
were using the words and like, all right, there's one seat.
There's one seat.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
So first one is get curious.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Curious, first curious, Okay, I get curious.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
To cultivate knowledge.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Number three change actually take the change. Yeah, and number
four is celebrate.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
All right, So you talk about communication a lot, and
you know, obviously communication is something that is probably the
least understood how to do it well, and yet it's
the most important thing in our lives is to be
able to learn to communicate. And so let's talk about
that a little bit as you look at what are
(24:32):
the challenges for people and their communication skills and how
do they improve communication at least from their point of view?
And then the second, the third question is if if
I change my communication skills, and am I going to
see a change in my wife's communication skills.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
Or I love your questions. Good, all right, So biggest
challenges in communication. Biggest challenges are we didn't learn how
to communicate, and there's so much good knowledge out there.
So Number one, I would say, learning how to listen
is one of the most incredible skills you will ever develop.
You don't if you are listening to me, and you
(25:17):
are or your partner or your child, if you're listening
to them right put that in quotes, and and you
are thinking of your response or how you're going to
defend yourself, or you're you know, or you're noticing other
things around the room, and you're not fully present and
really hearing what they're saying, and not just hearing but
you're starting to sense into the underlying feeling behind it.
(25:38):
You're not really listening, if you know, if you're not
getting your full attention, like eye contact and like nodding
your head and being present, you're not really listening and
they're not feeling listened to, they're not feeling heard. So
the number one we gathered how to listen. Number two,
we need to learn how to communicate in a way
the other person can receive us. I mean, I can
say I can just shout how I feel at somebody
(25:58):
doesn't mean they're going to get it. And so much
the time we feel like we're communicating because we're just
verbally vomiting, but the only person isn't receiving it, So
what's the point It's not being received. So we need
to make sure the message is getting through. And there's
so many beautiful skills we can learn around how to
do that. Some of them just being around how we
communicate presents. Some of them around how we invite people
(26:20):
into the conversations that are just throwing something at them.
You know, it's like, oh, my wife was stay in
the kitchen and I told her I was feeling. I'm like,
was she cooking? Was she able to give you her presence?
Did you stay it in a way that she was
going to receive you, or did you just like word vomit.
And you know, it makes such a big difference to
feel really heard. And on top of that, we can
(26:40):
learn about body language and about how do we create
a space to really talk. If we're trying to talk
in the middle of grocery shopping, it's probably not going
to be as well received as if we just say,
let's go to the park and sit down on a
bench and really like, give you to our full presents
and talk about this. Right, are you available for this conversation?
This invitation is so big to emotionally prepare somebody to
(27:01):
have a drop in time, it changes from a dialogue
and every day dand or two like we're here, really
really here to hear each other and learn. And then
I love this question. You know, I learned this question
from my husband. My husband, I have been married. This
will be our this ye'll be our tenth wedding. We
get married every year if we decide to get remarried.
Our commitment is not until death to us part. But
(27:21):
every year we tune back in and see how is
the health of our relationship and where is this going?
And he asked me this question, He's like, what does
it mean to you? And I have to say that
one question alone has changed the way I work with
my clients and with my kids, and with my husband's way.
I show up what does it mean to you? Because otherwise,
when I hear somebody speak, I have all sorts of
projections of what I think if they mean. But if
(27:43):
I drop in and say, but what does that mean?
To you, What is this thing that you want mean
to you? What? How do you what does this feeling
mean to you? It's a whole They have a whole
different life, they have a whole different lived experience. It's wild,
it's not mine. And I am so often surprised and
blown away by Wow, this is not what I thought
it was so truly being able to communicate and understand
(28:04):
something that's meaningful behind it, it's going to be one
of the most powerful things we can do, not just
in love, but in leadership and life. It's like whoa
if we can communicate so much as possible and get
off the text messages. I mean, there's a time and
a place for text messages, but we at the end
of the day, are we need to see each other's
facial expressions. We need to hear the changes in the
(28:25):
tone of voice. We need to see how our skin
changes color, or our breathing changes based on what's being said.
There's so much information that's nonverbal that we need to
see that we're losing touch with by doing internet dating,
by doing texting all the time. To handle communication like
we need to come back to the art of being
in connection well.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And you know, I love what you talked about there.
And you know when you talk about the first point
is listening, and I think you know, listening with understanding,
and you know, maybe for the audience. Just a good example,
as you were going through the four c's and I said, okay,
I want you to go through one more time, just
listening for me each time. And as you say, our
(29:06):
perceptions are so different, is it would be so interesting
for us to be able to listen to what someone
is saying and then ask questions say Okay, I'm not
quite sure I understand what you meant by that. And
that's where you're talking about getting into their reality and
really understanding. And then, as you say, and I love
this part, as you then respond to them, the question
(29:29):
is is how are you responding? And you know, as
you say, you've got your body language, you've got your words,
you've got your tonality, and all of those things can
affect the way that they perceive how you're communicating with them. Yes, much,
so much, so much, you know, and I tell this
story too, and I laugh about it. You know, I
(29:51):
get into the personality profiling and all of that type
of stuff. So I happen to be very much. And
you know, yeah, anyway, a combination of introvert and extrovert
left bring totally left ring. Okay, And so you know,
my kids for a while they're going dad, you know,
I realized, okay, so I learned I had and I
(30:13):
learned this when I was going through some programs. So
I now stop with my kids as we get into
communication and they're asking me a question, I said, all right,
I want to know. Do you want me just to
listen or do you want my opinion? Yeah? And you
know I had to do that because they felt like
I was criticizing them when I honestly was loving them
(30:34):
and trying to offer quote sage advice.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Because you're your wise dad, I get it.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
And now now it's like and we laugh about it.
It's like, all right, you want me to listen or
do you want my opinion? And a lot of times here,
d I just listener? No, No, I really would appreciate
your opinion. And I think that's come when they'd become
adults more. But I think it's so important first to
understand that, you know, we get into the personality types
and how we are, how we communicate, and understand that,
(31:04):
you know, what our body language, our words, how we
do it is so important and understanding how the other
individual wants to be communicated with and it's not the same.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
It's not the same.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah yeah, I mean for me, if someone talks and
talks and talks and talks and talks, it's like, just
get to the point. Just get to the point. Okay.
My daughter, who's more left brain extra, is like, let's talk,
let's talk, let's talk. You know, we'll be on the phone.
I'm going, okay, honey, it's time. Oh day, Okay, I'm
(31:38):
talking too much, right, go Yeah, And we laugh about it.
But the point is is that based on their personalities,
we talk the way we think we should talk, but
we don't understand that that's not maybe how the other
person wants to receive that communication.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
Yeah, And there's no right or wrong right, but it's
that awareness of these are two different persons. Thousand, where's
the win win for us? Like what is the sweet
spot where we both feel being heard and loved? And
that's that's the magic it Yeah yeah, okay, way to
go for you guys, figuring that out so.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Your opinion, you know, And and this happens all the time.
In relationships, when your partner triggers you, how do you
handle those emotions? What do you do? Now? I mentioned
a little bit of what I would do, but I'm
asking you when your partner, because obviously you've been married
ten years, you've got a great relationship. I'm sure you
have those triggers. Oh well, how do you handle that?
(32:34):
How do you handle those big emotions when you get
triggered by your partner, by your husband?
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Yeah, quick caveat. Of course I get triggered. Of course
he's triggered, Like we all get triggered. And even as
a relationship expert, I still am like I've got the tools,
and it's hard to use the tools all all the
time in the great way.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
So what do we do?
Speaker 4 (32:55):
Chapter five of my book is going to have really
clear like guidance of step by steps and stuff you
can do. Is going to have some really great stuff
on like way you can do stuff by step. There's
a lot of The important thing to know is that
everybody gets triggered, and that's okay. And one of the
greatest things you can do is just pause, give yourself
a chance to pause, to break the old pattern, the
(33:16):
old patterns you've been practicing for decades, so now we
either try something new. So whatever your whatever your trauma
response is, fye, flight, freeze, fawn, just pause. And I
love finding creative ways to do this and have some
fun and bring in some humor because we know that
there are some fights that are just going to be
unresolvable conflicts for the rest of your relationship and that's okay,
(33:37):
but we don't want these conflicts to be taken so
personally until last a week of disconnection or more. What
we wanted to do is get it down to the
situation arises, you feel the trauma coming in, you feel
the trigger coming in, the overwhelming is happening. You both
learn how to create a safe space for the pause
and go take care of yourselves for a moment, because
(33:58):
it's not about the situation. Like as you said, it's
not about the situation. So take a moment to pause,
go take a little bit of spaith and agree upon
what does that actually mean. Usually if about twenty minutes,
and here's what you're doing in that twenty minutes, we're
gonna just do with them. Checking in with our emotions.
You had emotion coach we did earlier. You can do
that with yourself, like what just happened? What am I feeling?
(34:19):
What is this reminded me of? And what do I
need right now? That's a great one. Just taking some
breaths or journaling can be really really helpful. But how
do you allow yourself to be with those emotions. I
love doing it, like being my body more. I really
believe our body holds a lot of tension and trauma.
So you know, doing some of the breathing and jumping
and shaking, or hit some pillows. We have. We have
pillows in all of our house and when whenever we
(34:41):
have big emotions, like our kids know, we're gonna go
to the pillows and we're all gonna just hit pillows
together just to move some of the energy and then
we can think more clearly because you feel at charge.
Right It's like some people are like I want to
hit something like great, then go hit a pillow. Don't
hurt yourself, don't hurt anybody else, Just go hit a pillow.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Great, you know?
Speaker 4 (34:57):
Or I want to scream, great, cover your hand into
a pillow, into your cover your mouth with your hands,
or cover your mouth with a pillow and just scream
for a minute. Like, trust your body that it wants
to move this and once it's moved in a way
it's not hurting anybody else, then e motion coach yourself.
Then just breathe and think about when have I felt
this before. It's reminding you of something from your past,
(35:19):
and that's where the golden nuggets of information are of
you know, in my path, this is how people would
respond to me. This is how lonely I felt, with
how angry I felt, and here's what I really am craving,
here's what I really want, And you can start to
learn how to ask for what you want and take
ownership of Shoot, babe, like I know we were in
this fight, and I know that you just wanted. Like
(35:41):
my husband and I have this example of hot sauce,
Like I ended up buying him dinner one night and
getting getting not enough hot sauce for him, and he
felt not considered, which is his big story of Oh,
it just pulses through his life. He's not considered enough, right, right,
and so then he doesn't feel consiirt because I didn't
get enough hot sauce, which was just the right. Life happens.
(36:01):
And for me, my big woe is me story through
my whole life. We call the core wound is I'm
not good enough. So as soon as he goes into
I'm not considering, I'm like, oh, I'm not good enough.
I didn't get enough hot sauce. Right. It is always,
not always, but almost always these same big underlying stories
that I have felt since I was a little girl,
and he just felt since he was a little boy.
(36:22):
And right now we're making it about the situation, but
it's not. And I can come back and say, Babe,
you know I wanted to fight you on this, but
I see I'm just feeling not good enough. Can you
can keep you be medicine for me instead of like
rareling into this disconnect. Can you just tell me that
I'm good enough even when I made a mistake And
he's like, yeah, can you just tell me that you
actually were considering me and he didn't forget about me. Yeah,
(36:43):
I am considering you. I was thinking about you, and
I am so sorry that I didn't know to get
that extra hot sauce. And this is where we get
to build connection instead of having the old wounds just
perpetuate and perpetuate and become more and more poisonous.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Well, and you know, you brought up something else that
I think is so important and I experienced this. You know,
you get into you get into the situation where you're
not happy with each other, and as you say, you
go and beat pillows, and I can imagine what happens
your kids watch you. You're watching each other, and all
of a sudden that anger turns into laughter.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Oh my gosh, you know what pillow bites we have.
It's ridiculous, you.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Know, And so it's so fascinating if you can find
ways that you can do that. I know that we watch,
you know, we watch a lot of movies that you know,
kind of this kind of stuff, fighting and so forth.
And every once in a while, after we've had some
kind of trauma going on there, we kind of look
(37:43):
at each other. We put our fists up and we
go back and forth like that and we start to
laugh and it's over. It's over. So to be able
to bring humor and laughter ultimately, find find ways to
do that, And you know that takes a conscious effort.
And I know you talk a little bit about conscious relationships,
(38:03):
and I'd love for you to just to kind of
talk a little bit about that. The conscious relationship and
how do you have those relationship agreements? And obviously and
as we get closer to the end, I'd love for
you to talk about conscious relationships and how do we
do that.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Yeah, So, in general, the idea is most people stop
being intentional about their relationships after they say I do,
And I just want to invite into the idea that
there's so much more possible and if we tune into
what is it that we really want, even in the
first dating phase when you know you guys are creating
a partnership, what is your foundation, like, what do we
(38:44):
want to be? And so my book Relationship Agreements is
all about how we take these assumptions and expectations instead
of having them stay out there, we talk about them
and we write them down. I love Google docs, super
easy to edit. You know, it's a living document. It's
going to change and evolve over time. You're going to
be different six months from now, They're going to be
different from six month monthsrom now. Your relationship is gonna
(39:04):
be different six months from now. So letting it evolve
over time and talking about okay, well, what do we
really want and why what does it mean to us?
And that could be everything from how we handle finances
to how we handle conflict, to how we communicate. Maybe
it's really important for me to get a good morning
and a good night text from you, and that's really
like something that's meaningful for me. Can we just agree
(39:25):
to that instead of me getting pissed off when you
don't send me that? Right, because you can know, or
our roles and responsibilities are on the house, or how
we're going to parent, or how are we going to
continue to invest in our intimacy and explore together? Right, Like,
all these things are things I think people take for granted,
and we develop these recipes that feel really comfortable but
(39:47):
stagnate over time. So instead of letting things stagnate, how
do we continue to choose, lean in, and choose to
evolve together. This is conscious relating and I really believe
you can create whatever you want from this space. And
when things aren't working anymore, you say this is not
working for anymore? What do we need to shift? And
we create a new agreement and then we can move
forward that new agreement and there's so much freedom and
(40:08):
safety in it, it's wild. So that is really what
I invite people to do, is create a blank canvas
and create the relationship you want and allow it to evolve.
Maybe check in once a quarter, you know, whatever feels
right for you, go on a little vacation or vacation
somewhere and to be like, how are we doing? Is
there any friction points? Am I noticing judgment towards you?
(40:29):
Or am I feeling judged by you or about this situation?
If there's that friction point, this is when we begin
the realer and love model again. This is when we
get really curious because there's this judgment and we're going
to go get the tools we need to move through
this and create a new way of being. We're going
to actually start using the tools, and we're going to
celebrate because it's really fun to celebrate that we're evolving together.
We're a team. Oh my gosh, how cool is that?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
And it takes two.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
And it takes it really does.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Yeah, yeah, it takes to And I think that's important
for folks to understand that it does take too. But also,
and I don't know if you've seen this occur with
the people you've coached and so forth. Have you found
when you work with the one individual and they really
start to experience that self love, and as they start
to learn how to communicate, you find sometimes that their
(41:16):
partner suddenly starts to come along even without doing any
of the coaching.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Yeah, and I know you you asked a question earlier
about like if I start using these communication tools with
my partner, So I didn't really speak into that. But
it's not always. Sometimes people get in partnerships where one
person is really focused on growth and development and this
is important to them, and that a person is so
happy just in life as they are and they don't
need anything more or they don't want anything more, because
(41:44):
it's probably more like they don't want. This can be
a really difficult combination in partnership, super hard. I imagine
like there's somebody driving a Ferrari and is ready to go,
and the other person feels like they're being dragged behind
the Ferrari, and then nobody feels great. We want to
be as a team together, in the driver's seat together,
and so many people just need the invitation to see
(42:07):
what else is possible because their nervous system, their lived
experience hasn't had any evidence yet that we can shift.
So if one person is making that shift, the other
person can see it and see that it's real. It's
not just some hokey thing they saw on a movie
or something that feels so distant. They're like, oh my gosh. Like,
if you're doing this and you're happier, I want to
(42:28):
bite that cake too. Can you share that? And all
of a sudden we have a new thing to talk about,
Especially if you're coming at it from a not a
higher than or a holier than thou standpoint, it's like, no,
this is who I am, and I'm so excited to
share with you. If you want to join me, you're
welcome to that invitation versus a versus a power dynamic.
It's really really beautiful, and I think that's where I
(42:49):
see the biggest shifts of It's okay if you're taking
a step on your own first, and see how they
respond with an invitation for them to try this too,
because it's just going to make life more fun, and
then see what happened, and if they still are not interested,
then there's something else to look at there.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah, then you have to make some other heavy decisions.
But you know, it's interesting and I love what you
talked about. As far as you and your husband, how
you know every one and I don't know how often,
but you said, say, all right, how are we doing what?
You know, the fact that we do evolve, that we change,
and how can we how can we continue to be
(43:25):
together with those changes and work with each other and
understand that? To me, that that is such a key
element to a successful relationship.
Speaker 4 (43:35):
Oh yes, I love that.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
So as we close, and you know we've talked about you,
you have gotten so much good information that you've shared
with us. What what would be kind of a final
message that you'd like to share with the audience.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
I just want to say that it is so possible
for you to learn a whole new way of loving
in a way that is going to set you free.
It's going to create freedom and safety for you to
be authentically yourself and still be loved, and for your
partner to be authentically themselves and still be loved. And
it takes courage and patience to lean into this idea
(44:14):
that you get to be a student again. We get
to you get to learn this thing that you've been
your heart has been creating that you know is possible,
You just need to learn how to do it. So
if you can lean into that and relearn Love everything
is possible.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Oh wonderful, wonderful, And how do the people talk a
little bit about your book again and how do they
find that? And then how do they find you?
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yeah, the easiest thing to do is go to Relearnlove
dot com. That is easiest place you're going to get everything.
You're going to find free masterclasses. You're going to find
paid programs where you can just do it yourself if
you want. You're going to find ways to work with me.
They're in a singles program or private coaching for singles
or people in relationship. You're going to find access to
(44:56):
the book and the audiobook. You're going to see a
link to my ted Talk everything is there, all these podcasts,
podcast will be on there. So we just want to
make it a one step shop of awesome resources. And
you can also go to Instagram which is at coach
Aery Kardosh and you're gonna have lots of wonderful things. Now.
If you sign up for like the free masterclass or anything,
(45:17):
you'll be on my email list. I love to connect
with people. Reach out to me if you have questions
or want any support, Like, I really am here to
make sure that the world gets the resources they need
to relearn love. And I'm just so grateful to be
on this, on this show with you, doctor Doug. Thank you,
thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Well and I appreciate it. Now, are you able to
go on to Amazon? Also?
Speaker 4 (45:35):
Yeah, so the book is on Amazon and Audible.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
So and yeah I love Audible me.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
Too, So you'll get to hear my voice. I actually
recorded it and my helped me with the other there's
a male voice in the in the book too, so
you get to hear both of our voices on it.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Wonderful. Hey, thank you so much. That is has just
been fantastic.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
So yeah, thank you doctor Doug. It's amazing. Have a
great day, and thank you everyone for tuning in.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
It means a lot, yes, and thanks folks, and I
hope you'll join us again soon. There's a doctor Doug saying, now,
mis day
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