What do blueberry pancakes and butterflies have to do with your happily ever after?

They’re part of divorce mediator Joe Dillon’s advice for staying married.

I’m a relationship coach. It's odd that I would want to introduce you to a divorce mediator, but he has so much great information to share with us about what he sees when it comes to divorces:

1. I found Joe Dillon online and his body of work was so extensive that I wanted to share it with you.
2. Joe is going to help you understand what typical patterns bring people to his office so that you can use those as a cautionary tale.
3. He'll also tell you what butterflies and blueberry pancakes have to do with your happily ever after.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit helps you make space for the individual inside of the shared life.

Joe and Cheryl have regular marriage meetings, and it was at one of these meetings that they exchanged legal pads full of their bucket list items. This helped them realize that even though they share a life, they may not share every dream. Joe and Cheryl decided that although they live in Southern California where there's a beach for Cheryl, they'll take a month during the year to move to Chicago so that Joe can get his city fix.

I invite you to trade bucket lists with your partner. What dreams do you share? Where will you have to compromise?

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Connect with my guest

Joe Dillon is a divorce mediator at Equitable Mediation. His unique blend of financial acumen, mediation expertise, and personal insights enable him to skillfully guide couples through complex divorce negotiations and reach fair agreements that safeguard the family’s emotional and financial health.

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What kind of Friendship date is good for your relationship?

Has life been noisy and busy and you just need some time of shared silence to both reset? What style of date would help you hush the ever-present noise filling your life? Maybe you need a date where you have some dedicated time to understand what your sweetheart is feeling.

Remember my framework of Partner, Lover, Friend? I’ve identified 3 roles inside your singular relationship: Partners want to achieve together. Friends assure each other we belong together. Lovers want to explore together.

1. Valentine’s Day is coming up and there is a lot of pressure to have THE PERFECT date, but I want to challenge this notion of THE PERFECT date.
2. Instead, I’d like to talk about great dates for the three roles inside your relationship. Let’s break it down into three episodes to talk about each role: Partner, Friend, and Lover.
3. Today we’re talking about designing a great date for the Friend inside your relationship.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to put a Friendship-building date night onto your calendar.

Date Night Discussion

This week I invite you to talk about the kinds of dates that promote Friendship in your relationship. Your Friendship will be deepened by two things: talking and listening.

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What type of date does the Lover inside your relationship need?

Remember my framework of Partner, Lover, Friend? I’ve identified 3 roles inside your singular relationship: Partners want to achieve together. Friends assure each other we belong together. Lovers want to explore together.

1. Valentine’s Day is coming up and there is a lot of pressure to have THE PERFECT date, but I want to challenge this notion of THE PERFECT date.
2. Instead, I’d like to talk about great dates for the three roles inside your relationship. Let’s break it down into three episodes to talk about each role: Partner, Friend, and Lover.
3. Today we’re talking about designing a great date for the Lover inside your relationship.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to put a Lover date (or several!) onto your calendar.

Date Night Discussion

This week talk about the types of Lover dates that your relationship might need.

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The Partner role in your relationship asks, “Can I rely on you?”

The Lover asks, “Do you make my life exciting?”

And the Friend asks, “Do you really know me?”

Remember my framework of Partner, Lover, Friend? I’ve identified 3 roles inside your singular relationship: Partners want to achieve together. Friends assure each other we belong together. Lovers want to explore together.

1. Valentine’s Day is coming up and there is a lot of pressure to have THE PERFECT date, but I want to challenge this notion of THE PERFECT date.
2. Instead, I’d like to talk about great dates for the three roles inside your relationship. Let’s break it down into three episodes to talk about each role: Partner, Friend, and Lover.
3. Today we’re talking about designing a great date for the Partner inside your relationship.

If you’re new to my podcast and you’d like an overview of the three roles, listen to my last episode with Dayna Haig-Conway, a therapist in Fernie, British Columbia who recently interviewed me.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to create a recipe for a Partner date at your house. I use 5 steps when I’m coaching couples to find a Partner date:

1. Identify a conflict.
2. Identify the dream you each have for a shared life.
3. Build a bridge from conflict to your dream.
4. Plan to fail.
5. Begin again.

Date Night Discussion

I invite you to have a discussion with your sweetheart about how and why you appreciate the Partner you already have.

This week invite your sweetheart for a slice of toast, a cup of coffee, and tell your sweetheart 3-5 things that you appreciate about sharing a life with them.

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“What if relationship conflict isn’t about communication SKILLS–but about misunderstood needs?”

This is the foundational question Fernie resident and Counselor, Dayna Haig-Conway asked me when I got to be a guest on her podcast–CAMP Conversations: Keys to Resilience–recently.

I’m eager to share her conversation with you. Dayna’s approach is to search for “the needs behind the needs,” and I am thrilled I get to introduce you to this gem of a human being:

1. You’ll hear how The Partner, The Lover, and The Friend can unintentionally compete with each other, confusing your communication and making it tough to see what each person truly needs.
2. You’ll hear why naming HOW you communicate matters as much as WHAT you’re saying. Hint: your animal body communicates too.
3. You’ll get some simple language shifts that will reduce defensiveness and cultivate understanding with your sweetheart.

Connect with Dayna Haig-Conway

1. I invite you to listen/watch her podcast.
2. Explore the world of resilience and service she’s building for front line caretakers like nurses and teachers.
3. Or book a discovery call with her to see how she might be able to help you locate the needs behind your needs.

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What’s the best thing you can do to create momentum with a habit?

If you want to form a new habit, psychologists tell us the biggest momentum builder is a positive emotional rush. Joy. Today we talk about the most important part of the habit-building cycle: celebration.

1. You’ll learn why celebrating those tiny changes in the directional vector toward your destination matters so much
2. You’ll hear about the biology of celebrating and how it contributes to habit formation
3. And you’ll get a host of questions to help you celebrate to strengthen your own efforts at habit formation rather than relying on circumstances to make you feel better.

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is…to celebrate!

To help you celebrate better and more consistently, I’ve designed a couple questions to guide you. Use these questions to help you mine for the positive emotions associated with the way you’re living your life.

Date Night Discussion

Today the discussion I want to suggest isn’t with your partner, but rather with yourself.

And it’s a simple question. I invite you to ask yourself, “Did I truly let myself see and celebrate the tender habit of hello (or whatever habit you are building) I am creating?”

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How is your negativity bias impacting your relationship, and taking you off course?

Today, we’re talking about that little voice we all have that tends to focus on what’s wrong in our relationship instead of what’s right.

Last week I shared a favorite quote from Jim Rohn, “Direction determines destination.” We talked about planes that are off course 90% of the time they’re in the air, but still manage to land in the appointed destination.

The critical element for a pilot is to keep refining that vector of direction, a little north…oh! Overshot it. Now a little south. North again. South a smidge. Until your destination is inevitable.

Similarly, when you’re able to focus on your direction—and all the tiny vectors of habits we talk about on this show—the destination of happily ever after takes care of itself.

But what happens when that negative voice pipes up saying, “You never flush the toilet?” Or “You never kiss me hello.”

1. We’ll talk about how this tiny voice is trying to help you, even if it’s really annoying
2. I’ll offer you 3 specific steps to mollify that voice
3. And, I’ll guide you with a discussion prompt so you and your partner can get past the negativity and connect with more hopefulness

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to practice the negativity bias trifecta:

1. Name it
2. Tame it
3. Muscle up

Date Night Discussion

This week I invite you to talk about your negativity bias with your partner.

Tell your partner all the various disguises it might wear. Ask about your partner’s negativity bias.

I recommend naming it something goofy. Get a tchotchke that will help you develop a humorous relationship with your negativity bias.

Register for my upcoming virtual event.

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Do you ever feel frustrated because you’re experiencing the same stumbling blocks you faced last year?

And you thought you’d dealt with those…but here you are again. Yuck.

I am a life coach. I hear this complaint over and over. We work on something, my client and I. There’s a shift. Life is good. My client feels motivation and freedom, and then, a year later: Bam. They’re back where they started.

Today, we discuss one of my favorite quotes from Jim Rohn, “Direction determines destination.”

1. We’ll talk about a fallacy that might be keeping you from feeling happy today
2. You’ll learn about what airplanes and the pilots who fly them have to do with your happiness
3. And I’ll introduce you to the word asymptote and tell you how just that idea can make you happier

Habit for Your Happily Ever After

This week’s habit for your happily ever after is to examine where your life is an asymptote. An asymptote is a mathematical concept that, when expressed as a line on a graph, the line gets closer and closer to the x axis, but never actually touches it. Where are you getting closer and closer to the life of your dreams?

You might even want to plot some points on your graph of life so that you can SEE how much closer to your dream life you’ve gotten.

Date Night Discussion

This week I invite you to talk with your partner about destination and direction.

What is a destination you’re chasing? What vectors of habit are you using to point you there?

What kind of support would you love to have from your partner when it comes to your habit vectors?

What hope would you like to stir or inspire when it comes to who you will become as you travel the road on your way to your destination?

Register for my upcoming virtual event.

Visit the show notes here.

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Reach me at 970-210-4480