– Do you do a weekly check-in with your spouse? And if you’re thinking why would I wanna do that? Well, stay tuned and learn about this exercise that Russ and I been doing for the life of our marriage. I wanna give a special mention to Jill Therese. Thank you so much for subscribing to our channel. And thank you for all of your continued support. Jill helps clear up acne naturally. If you want to be featured next time, subscribe, leave a thoughtful comment below with #imforyou, Intentional Marriages for you. My name is Danielle West, and this is my husband, Russ.
– Welcome everyone.
– A weekly check-in has been by far one of the best things we’ve ever done. And we’ve been-
– Absolutely.
– Practicing it the last 15 years. And it has been very powerful for us.
– Absolutely. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take the next three weeks and review the three things we do on the weekly check-in. The first week we’re gonna talk about the schedule, which is today, we’ll go into that a little much deeper. And then next week, we’ll talk about hopes and dreams. So each week, we start out by reviewing our schedule, then we go over our hopes and dreams. And you might think it’s weird to do hopes and dreams every week but actually, we found that we kind of just assume that our spouse is aligned with our hopes and dreams. And so, some of these can be really big, some small, and we’ve found has been very viable to talk about in each week. And then the third thing we’ll do in the third week, is we’ll talk about the thing that’s probably the most powerful of the weekly check-in. And so what we do is we talk about how we’ve hurt each other that week or if we’ve done anything that’s frustrated, angered, embarrassed, but any kind of conflict, we make sure we address every week during the weekly check-in. And then we finish it up by talking about what we’ve done right that week, so that we kind of train our brains to think about the things that we appreciate about our spouse. So those are the three weeks, the schedule, the hopes and dreams, and then what have we done wrong and what have we done right that week? And then that last one sounds like, “Wow, I don’t wanna do that”, but I’m telling you, that has been the most powerful of anything we’ve probably done in our marriage.
– Yeah, so don’t miss that week. What I love about the schedule is it allows me to know what big meetings Russ has. And if he’s gonna be traveling out of town, it allows me to schedule some things on my own. And whether we’re gonna be meeting up with the kids or not that week.
– Right.
– So I really love comparing our schedules and knowing whether we’re gonna be home for dinner or not.
– Of course, the schedule part helps so much with communication. As we all know, communication is a big thing in marriage. And this is one little thing that really helps on the communication front, right? Helps us make sure we don’t miss things. And so for me, one of the things that I love about it that just kind of came out, you know, by happenstance, or something that I have enjoyed so much is it never fails. If I say I’ve got an important meeting, say on Tuesday at three o’clock, then it never fails that 2:59 I get a text from Danielle that says, “I’m praying for your big meeting.” And it means so much and she didn’t tell me ahead of time she’s going to do that. She just remembers when we go over the schedule that I’ve mentioned that I’ve got something I’m a little anxious about. It could be a meeting, it could be something about the kids or anything. But she knowing the schedule, she’s always does a great job of making sure that she puts on the calendar and then either prays for me or gives me some kind of encouragement.
– [Danielle] Or send them a fun Bitmoji.
– [Russ] Exactly. She’s queen of the Bitmojis.
– I try to make a Bitmoji for him, but he didn’t like it.
– It was kind of guiby and… Hers look beautiful like her but mine look guiby. I’m like, “I really look like that?”
– I try to make it real muscular.
– Yeah, that is guiby. Although my father knows best for you that can remember that.
– Yeah. So one thing that we really wanna make sure that you hear every week from us, is this took a lot of practice. Each time we improved, we got better. Don’t be too hard on yourself when you’re like, “Oh, we forgot to have it this week.” It’s something that we had to put into our schedule. We actually did it when we would take a walk on Saturdays. And I liked it because at the third question, have I hurt you? I’m not crazy about conflict. So I’d rather be walking side by side. Than face on for that kind of discussion. Over time I’ve gotten more comfortable, but I did a really poor job on the week three of this on have I hurt you. So, tune in on week three, if you wanna hear some good stuff.
– Yeah.
– You wanna get the dirt on me tune into week three.
– Week three is really really good one. So, this is all about being intentional in our marriage. It’s probably one of the greatest things we can do from an intentional perspective, we set aside an hour or so each week to walk through this. And make sure you do it when you’re “Emotionally Safe”, which will we’ll be talking about in a webinar in the future. Make sure it’s an emotional safe place that you’re prepared for it, that you’re not exhausted or already angry. You know, for us late Saturday morning seems to be the best time for us. But that’s just because that’s when we’re the freshest. You know, it’s at the end of the week. Usually, we’ve had the best night’s sleep on Friday night, we’ve had to sleep, get to sleep in, I’m not anxious ’cause we’re not getting up and worried about work. So for us late Saturday morning has always been a good time. But you’ll have to find what’s best. We will let you know. Do not do this while you’re driving.
– Oh, yeah.
– We had a couple who did it while they were driving and got in a fight and the guy jumped out of the car.
– While it was still rolling.
– While it was still rolling. So, we don’t want you to do this in the car so. But do find a time where you can be comfortable and relaxed. Because when you get into the part about have I done anything to hurt you or anger you or frustrate you this week, that can bring up some tough feelings and things to work through. So you wanna make sure you’re in a good head space when you do that.
– And one thing I wanna mention, one couple had practices and then they aborted, even having the weekly check-in, ’cause they didn’t like the third question. And they felt like they were trying to pick on each other and find stuff. There’s two ways to look at this. Number one, there’s always gonna be stuff that happens during the week that is worthy of discussing. But even if you had a very calm week, and you don’t have anything that has hurt you from from your spouse, it’s still a great opportunity on that third question to ask, “What did I do, right?”
– Right.
– So that’s one reason why we still encourage to do the weekly check-in, but the other is, if you’re just starting out on this, just do the first two.
– Right.
– You know, there’s some people that are a little bit more nervous about question three, is just do the schedule and the hopes and dreams.
– Right.
– And if you even wanna back up to that just do the schedule, and just get used to checking in on what the schedule is like every week.
– Right.
– This takes a lot of practice. Break it down when you’re just getting started. And over time, you will find that this one discussion each week, brings so much intimacy that it even has surprised us.
– Yeah, and hopefully when we do the third week, you’ll see that you can actually be upset with each other beforehand but feel closer after when you learn how to manage conflict and learn how to repair.
– And I’ve been determined in some of those conversations that I am not going to like him at the end of this conversation. I am determined I’m gonna stay mad.
– But if we do it well then we’ll be closer afterwards.
– Yeah. Well, we hope this has been helpful. We will put the blog of the weekly check-in under this webinar so that you can read over it and we hope you join us for week two when we talk about our hopes and dreams.
– Thanks so much for joining us. Bye bye.
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