Matthew McConaughey: Conscious Parenting | Forward Progress

Actor and author Matthew McConaughey shares premarital conversations between him and his now-wife Camila Alves McConaughey, including how they want to approach their partnership differently than their parents. Later, he offers up a few of the motivational mantras both he and Camila work to instill in their children, including how they don’t subscribe to words like “can’t” and “hate,” and the long-term benefits of dealing with discomfort immediately.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
As we wrap up the week, we're bringing you one of the many
positive messages from our past interviews.
Each Thursday we're sharing stories of our most watched
athletes, celebrities and leaders.
We hope these problem solving narratives inspire you to tackle
obstacles in your own life. This week.
Matthew McConaughey, you said inyour book, you're in your mid

(00:23):
30s. I was looking for a lifetime
lover, a best friend and a mother to be at that point in
your life. Why do you think you hadn't
found that yet? It's a great question that I
don't really know the answer to,but it's a mix of, it's a mix of
that timing where, where are we individually in our life and who
do we have in them at that time And been fortunate to have some

(00:48):
wonderful relationships where I don't have any regret to those.
And we just like, you know, thisis as far as we could go, you
know, that later on, I guess whatever age it was, that's when
I met that I soon learned was bethe woman for me, which is
Camilla now my wife. One of the things you guys have

(01:08):
at least close to in common thatI found amazing.
I never even met anybody whose parents had been divorced twice,
remarried 3 times. What do you remember from having
that conversation? And we kind of laughed about it.
We're always kind of yeah, right.
What's that no marriage thing about our parents couldn't quite
pull it off. Or actually, let's look at it

(01:28):
this way. Maybe our parents loved it so
much. They did it.
They kept doing it. Well, maybe our parents really
loved honeymoons, you know, so we kind of self half seriously
always choked it off. But also recognized, say if we
get married, really make sure we're doing it for the right
reason. We both agree we don't want to
in our relationship go through that.

(01:51):
Like let's let's try and do thiswithout divorce, remarry,
divorce, remarry, divorce. Let's try and do it without such
extremes here. Why were you concerned with
losing yourself if you got married?
I, I want, like I think most people want to have 100% of an
experience. And my fear then was, Oh well,

(02:15):
if you marry, you're only getting 50% of the the
experience and they're getting 50.
And then I worked to realize, no, no, no, no.
Actually, if you're with the right person, you can have 100%
the experience with them. They can have 100%.
And actually together, the funnymath is it's 300% your.

(02:37):
Kids, how do you handle situations if they say I can't,
I hate or lie? And then the other part of the
question is the concept you're trying to instill in terms of
delayed gratification, so. If they say I can't, if they
could say goodbye, can you help me with this?
I can't get it done. I mean, like you what?

(02:57):
And I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
Like I can't get this thing. Then I go, you what?
And then they go, I'm having trouble because they know enough
about that that we don't want togo through like believe in that
were those words and that if youare having trouble doing
something, you are even unable to do something hate.

(03:17):
They got that one kind of down. That one clicked in for them
really quick, really quick as a bad as a as a as a bad word and
not a way to look at life or feel about people and things or
each other. We're going to lie thing.
We're not all going to be perfect.
We're going to screw up. We got a we got a man up and
woman up on our mistakes here. If you come up and you admit the

(03:39):
mistake, we'll get through. We'll go through it with you.
This leads into delayed gratification.
You start to becomes more stressful for you to keep up the
lie, to hide the lie, to go to sleep with the lie on your
conscience. All these things will create
more stress for you tomorrow, which is not being kind or cool
to your future self. So let's deal with an immediate

(04:03):
discomfort now. But I think even as adults, I
think it's AI think it's a majorconcept that is is valuable for
us all that we could all use more, give more value to the
value of leg gratification as individuals, as a nation, as
people in the world, as adults, not just kids.

(04:26):
Make an investment in yourself. Make an investment in things
that you love, your family, yourfriends, your business.
Let it pay you back. Do things today that make it
give you mailbox money, not onlyin your bank account, but in
your soul's account. Make those choices.
That's delayed gratification andthe value of it.
But the kids, you know, they they clicked into the

(04:48):
understanding of delayed gratification when I won the
Oscar. And they said, what'd you get
the trophy for? And I said, well, you remember a
year ago when we were working and you said Popeye was super
skinny. He said he had a neck like a
giraffe. They go, yeah, I go, well, the
work I was doing then a year ago, my peers gave me a trophy
for today because they deemed itexcellent work.
And they went, wait a minute, You got a trophy for something

(05:09):
you did a year ago ago? Yes, exactly.
We'll be back with another positive story from a past
interview next Thursday, and we'll pull it from our highest
performing clips according to our digital community.
Head over to youtube.com/graham Bensinger to join us.
Thanks again for listening.