My wife and I have been together since high school and moved in together shortly after. We’ve been together since 2008, got married in 2015, moved to a different state in 2017, and have learned a lot along the way. We recently attended 10x Growth Con 3, and I think our relationship is stronger and more aligned than ever.

I wrote this post with the intention of sharing our Week in Review document that we go through together every week because it has created even better communication and alignment between me and Azhalia. I will be sharing that, but it also got me thinking…

What have we done to create a happy marriage? Why are we always excited to wake up to see each other in the morning? How can we continue to create memories and build a life that we are proud of?

I attempt to answer those questions below. I hope you find a few nuggets that can be applied to your life. Just want the Week in Review document? Just scroll to the bottom 🙂

Key #1: Honesty (with oneself)

Honesty is the key to knowing yourself and being truly seen and loved for who you are. Honesty unlocks the door to your spouse’s eyes.

I started with this key because it’s the easiest to control. YOU are in control of yourself. YOU have the option to look yourself in your eyes and ask if you’re looking with your true purpose. It is a scary question, but one you have to ask yourself if you want to have a meaningful life.

Here’s the truth. A LOT of relationships struggle because of this. You’re not honest with yourself, you don’t know what you want, and you project yourself onto others creating a hostile environment. How can somebody love you if you don’t know who you are and love yourself?

Self discovery is one of the greatest pains and joys in life. It’s a never ending journey. If you haven’t dived in yet, now’s the time. You want to be able to look back and say that you lived your life to your fullest potential. They are big shoes to fill, but it will be worth it.

But wait… There ARE plenty of relationships where people aren’t honest with themselves!

There are two ways to look at it. 1) It’s a good relationship, not a great one or 2) Some spouses can see your unique gifts and potential before you do. If the later is the case, HOLD on to that person for dear life and prove them right! I was lucky enough to have my wife bet on me, and EVERY day, I work on living up to the man she sees in me and the expectations I have set for myself.

Key #2: Transparency

Transparency and communication is the key to the creating and growing trust. Transparency opens the door to your spouse’s ear.

Trust is a key ingredient to any relationship. Once you’ve earned their trust, then they will believe what you have to say and more likely to actually listen to you because they value your honest input. Why would somebody waste time listening to you if they can’t trust what you have to say?

There is a clear distinction between reactive transparency and active transparency. You can think of reactive transparency similar to when a news outlet reports a negative act by a company and the company then deciding to react with transparency and honesty. While active transparency is being proactive about the scenario and the company actually delivering the news to its customers and the news outlets.

The goal is to practice active transparency! You want to be proactive in your relationship about what is going on in your world, your thoughts, and how you really feel about “x” scenario.

Active transparency can only be conveyed through communication. Communication is the ONLY way for your spouse to know what you’re thinking. You can make all the hints in the world, but it’s best to just be clear and communicate what you want. As my wife always says, “People aren’t mind readers!” Don’t be mad at them for that. Be excited that you get the opportunity to communicate and better build your relationship together!

There are clearly many different ways to communicate something, especially depending on the scenario. I’m generally a strong listener who actively avoids anchoring ideas or trying to influence a conversation.

However, in a gym scenario, that is not how I communicate. I’ve been motivated by getting pushed HARD and thought it was the same for everybody else. I figured that’s how I could motivate my wife in the gym too.

Boy was I wrong. BUT, I didn’t get mad that my method didn’t work. I acknowledged that this wasn’t the best way to communicate, learned what was better, and began implementing new ways of communicating.

Remember, communication is a two-way street and Azhalia did her part too. I didn’t have to guess that she wasn’t happy with how I was communicating, she made it clear that something needed to change. We worked on it together. I’m not saying the change was instant, but we decide instantly to start making changes.

It’s also important to realize that communication is something that requires reciprocal action. Communication happens when an idea is conveyed to one person, and information is received and internalized by the other. Which leads me too…

Key #3: Listening

Listening is the key to your spouse’s worldview and appreciating them for their uniqueness and what the way they think. Listening opens the door to their mind.

This will sound dumb but… You actually have to care about, and be interested in what your spouse is saying. I know, a revolutionary concept, right?! It is a key component though. Your intent has to be that you are going to actively listen because you care about what your spouse has to say.

Not all conversations are created equal and they shouldn’t be treated that way. I should stop here, and say again that I’m not an expert on this topic, and I’m probably making up terms.

With that said, I’m going to break it down into two types of conversations. There are probably more, but I’m going to stick with two for now. And as I wrote that, I thought of three types… So we’ve upgraded to three types of conversations.

1. Expression-based conversations: These sound like small talk, discussions about people, gossip, AND can sound like problems that need to be solved. 99% of the time they aren’t. It’s just stories being shared. It’s entertainment. It’s venting. Your job is to be present & listen–and validate that this is in fact a expression convo vs. a solution convo.
2. Solution-based conversations: These can sound like expression-based conversations The big difference is that in these conversations you job is to provide your own feedback and thoughts. I’m lucky enough to have a wife where we’ve built enough trust to where we can just simply ask, “Are you looking for feedback or just sharing your experiences today?”
3. Dialogue-based conversations: These sound like discussions about life, the future, ideas, and what makes each other happy. These are the conversations where you get to truly know your partner and build a life together. You job is to listen, appreciate your partner, and share your thoughts. I was mindful of using the word thoughts here instead of feedback. Thoughts are just what you think about the topic. Feedback has an end goal of providing ideas for improvement.

In my mind, dialogue-based conversations have both sharing thoughts and sharing feedback, BUT it starts with sharing thoughts. Conversations start in an unstructured way where ideas are shared. It’s a time for brainstorming and endless ideas. That needs to happen before getting more structured and providing feedback. You don’t want to see and anchor a conversation with your feedback too early. Let it flow, find where it lands, then provide your feedback.

Listening Tip: Be Present

Being present isn’t always easy. There are endless distractions. I used to be really good at naturally being present. I’ve struggle more lately. Meditation has helped me a lot in recapturing this skill. The basic idea is to acknowledge and release.

You’re having a conversation being present, and then BAM–your brain starts thinking about other things or something to say. Now you’re either not present or listening to respond instead of listening to understand. When this happens, simply acknowledge it with “Oh, interesting, thoughts,” visualize those thoughts fading away/ dismiss the, and go back to being present.

BUT ANTHONY, I HAD A GREAT RESPONSE. I’m sure it was a great response. If it really is a great response, you’ll naturally remember it again when it is your turn to talk.

Key #4: Affection

Affection is the key to your spouse feeling loved and appreciated. Affection opens the door to their heart.

I believe expressing affection is rooted in love and appreciation. There are four ways that come to mind for how affection can be expressed: time & attention, acts of romance, acts of labor, and verbal. Most of these are pretty clear, so I won’t go too deep into these.

Time & Attention–I essentially think of this as “quality time.” It the time where there’s no other agenda than to enjoy each others time and company.

Acts of Romance–Exactly like it sounds. Date night, buying chocolates, flowers, cuddling, etc.

Acts of Labor–Doing things that seem indirectly related to your relationship, but are actually directly or at least partially related to your relationship. Working the extra hours so you can live more comfortably, cleaning the house, running errands, maybe even going to the gym!

Verbal–You can do any/ all of the above, but some people just want to be told that you love them. It’s quite a simple act that is often overlooked. It could be the small thing that your relationship is missing though!

Key #5: Vision

Vision is the key to your spouse feeling empowered and ambitious. Vision opens the door to their soul.

Creating a vision for life together and being on a mission to accomplish our dreams has propelled our relationship into another stratosphere. Having an open environment where we can have a sincere dialogue about what we want in life, where we want to go, and what we’re willing to sacrifice, has created the strongest alignment with our purpose in life.

Some questions to start the conversation started:

• What does your ideal day look like?
• What are your goals? Are they big enough?
• What is your personal why? What is your purpose in life?
• What is your spouse’s why? What is your spouse’s purpose in life?
• Where do all of the above intersect between you and your spouse? What parts of your life will you grow together and where will you grow independently? How can you support each other in both sets of growth areas?

Now that we’ve gone through that… How can we make sure we continue to stay aligned? COMMUNICATION, and maybe our Week in Review template 😉

Week in Review [Downloadable Template]

So, 1,800+ words later, we get to the reason I created this post. To share our Week in Review Template!

This link will send you to a Google Drive folder. It will include a Google Doc with the latest version and PDFs of different versions as they get updated over time. If you use the Google Doc version, you can select File > Make a copy to get your own version. You can also download it using File > Download as…

I do want to note that this is something that my wife and I use together, but it is definitely a great tool for an individual to use as a weekly recap as well.

If you’re using it as a couple, I recommend each person filling it out individually and then going over it together. Typically, this is our process.

1. Complete the Accomplishments, Experiences, Energy, Takeaways, and Areas for Improvement topics, then review together. You can alternate your response for each topic, then move to the next topic.
2. Complete the Wheel of Life section, and then review together.
3. Complete The Rule of 5 (by John Maxwell) and Financials sections, then review together.
4. Lastly, we work through the Pt. 2: Planning section individually, and then review together.

I did my best to make it clear what to do in each section, but I’ll go over some things worth noting below.

Part 1, is a recap of the week. We live life so quickly that we forget to take some time to stop and think about what happened. This is the opportunity to stop and reflect on the good and the bad, so that you can make next week even better.

There is a question about “flow” in the energy section. This refers to a state of mind where you complete a task with ease and little or no resistance to get it done. It’s tasks that you thoroughly enjoy and are fully present in. You may be so engaged with the activity that you look up and it’s an hour or two has seemingly flown by. These activities are important to acknowledge because they are areas where your brain is completely engaged and probably an activity you want more of in your life.

For the Takeaways section, this pertains to lessons from our personal growth practices and general takeaways from how the week went. Often we listen to personal growth videos together, read books and share insights, or just discuss things we’ve learned from real life experiences. This is an area to make sure your top learnings are actually remembered and you can start to think how you can incorporate those learnings into your life.

For the Wheel of Life, I hope I have given a good example of how to use it in the actual doc. The only thing I want to note is that my wife used the actual wheel (since she likes to print out the doc and fill it out), while I use the table since I edit the document digitally. In the “Relationships” category, we do separate scores for S/O (significant other) and friends.

I think that covers everything! Too lazy to scroll up to get the Week in Review doc? You can get it here 🙂

P.S. Near the end of writing this my wife and I were talking to a lady about vacation planning. In the midst of our conversation, she said that we were so cute, we must be newlyweds. Looking back on this article I will say that I had a blind spot in creating it. It was created with the idea of leading up to the Week in Review doc. There are plenty of other keys to a happy marriage. A BIG one that I missed was laughter/having a good sense of humor/not taking ourselves too seriously.