Brian Johnson introduces Gay and Katie Hendricks—relationship experts and personal mentors—via a short, informal PNTV episode. He frames love as a subject to be studied and mastered, recounts that he and his partner were married by the Hendricks and recently returned from their honeymoon, and then summarizes key Hendricks-taught practices: offering frequent appreciations (aiming for a 5:1 positive-to-negative interaction ratio per John Gottman), journaling appreciations (including self-appreciation), taking 100% responsibility and maintaining healthy individuation, recommitting when you drift, and truth-telling via candid "sweaty five-minute" conversations. He also points viewers to hendricks.com and the couple's Facebook presence for more resources.
Chapters
Foreign. This is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on Gay and Katie Hendrix, two relationship experts who actually just married my goddess and I. Hey, babe, you want to come in and have a camera? Come on and say hi? See, I've got a little ring on now. Pretty excited. So we just got married three weeks ago. Just got back from our honeymoon yesterday, in fact, actually the day before yesterday. And doing this note first, we got a little wave from the goddess back there. You got to come in and say hi. Give me a little smooch. Give me kisses. Awesome. Thanks, babes. I love her. So back to the regularly scheduled program, Gay and Katie Hendrix. They're awesome. Two leading relationship experts. The book that they're known for is Conscious Loving, among many others. They combined have written over 30 books, and we got to know them over the last several years. They've become close friends and mentors of ours. They actually live just down the street and. And we were blessed to have them marry us in their backyard in a private ceremony, which was awesome. I will link to our vows, which we created as commitments largely based on this book. So they've been deep inspirations for us, and they're really just the embodiment of conscious loving and conscious relationships. And before I even knew what they did, I remember noticing just how much they appreciated one another. Just spontaneously they would say, you know, I really appreciate this about you in the middle of a normal interaction in a really cool way. And as it turns out, that's a core part of their teaching. So what we're going to do is take a quick look at some of my notes from a couple of the workshops that we've done together that have been really formative in our relationship, given us some great skills. So let's go ahead and jump in without further ado, and thank you for allowing me to indulge in. In a little bit of celebration. So first, number one thing about love. I have a quote in here, actually, from Leo Buscaglia from his great book Love, which we'll also do a PNTV on soon. But he says, look, if you want to study love, and if you want to master love, rather, you've got to study it just like you'd study anything else. And you wouldn't go to someone who hadn't studied how to fix cars. You wouldn't go to a mechanic who hadn't studied how to fix cars, who wouldn't go to a chef who hadn't studied how to prepare amazing meals. Well, Same thing with relationships. Why is it that we have no preparation, we put no energy into actually studying how to love and how to create amazing relationships? It's one of the most important things in our lives, yet there's very, very little instruction on it. And we put very little energy and very little attention into mastering this subject. And Buscaglia says, look, if you want to master it, you've got to put in just as much energy into love and relationships as you would into a sport or a musical instrument or into cooking or anything else you want to master. So I start with that lead quote, and we'll take a quick look at a few of the things that we practice in our relationship that we picked up from Gay and Kati. The first one is appreciation. So appreciation is an amazing thing. First of all, we. When you appreciate something, which means in the dictionary, to recognize the full worth of something, that's the dictionary definition of appreciation, to recognize the full worth of something. Now, something amazing happens when you do that. When you recognize the full worth of something, the value of that object or person increases. So as you appreciate someone that their value appreciates, it's a really cool idea. Two meanings in one word, appreciation. And we know scientifically, John Gottman, this researcher up in Washington has studied relationships, and he knows relationships so well that he can bring a couple into his lab in a matter of seconds. He can tell which relationship is going to end and which is likely to end and which relationship is likely to flourish based on the ratio of positive interactions and negative interactions. Little subtle things like whether they cut one another off negatively or they praise one another positively, or they move closer to one another in touch, or they move away from one another. Positive and negative interactions. What he found was there's a critical ratio in relationships that survive and thrive versus those that don't. And the ratio is five, five to one. We've got to have five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Five to one. Now, I learned this from Gaye and Katie, and they actually teach couples in their workshops. You can learn more about them at hendricks.com hendrix.com, h e n d r I c k dash s dot com and if you go to Facebook and search for Gay and Katie Hendrix, you'll find an awesome fan page that they have where they share a lot of these ideas all the time. They're great about it. Really great community growing over there. But what they teach is how to give appreciations and how to receive appreciations. Again, we don't have much practice on that. So in the note, what I suggest is you start looking at things you can appreciate in the people who are in your lives. Whether it's your significant relationship, your kids, your parents, your colleagues, even the guy on the road. He just cuts you off. What can you appreciate? Rather than criticize about the people in your life? We want to create at least a 5 to 1 ratio. It's a really powerful thing. And in here, I suggest you right now journal what are 10 things you appreciate about your significant other or your kids or whoever it is you want to brainstorm about? Think about all the things you appreciate about them. And then when you go home today, think about and interact and share with them all the things that you appreciate about them consistently. It's a huge thing. We've got to build up that bank account balance so we've got a greater than 5 to 1 ratio of negative, positive to negative things. Really cool idea. And then while you're at it, think of all the things you appreciate about yourself. We're going to talk about love a lot more as we develop our work and as I develop my work, we're going to do some stuff together. I'm working on something called optimal living 101. Right now, love is one of the key attributes. One of the things I talk about there is you can't give what you don't have. If we don't love ourselves, we can't give that love to others. So what do you appreciate about yourself? Or do you have a five to one relationship and ratio between positive and negative interactions with yourself? If you don't, you're not going to have a very good relationship with yourself. So start noticing when you have negative things going on in your mind and create more positive things. You can start right now by appreciating yourself more. Another big thing, we've only got a few more minutes, so I'm going to go kind of quickly as I tend to do. But another thing is we want to take full responsibility. They have this experiment where you stand next to your partner and you gently touch shoulders, but you're totally grounded on your own, Right? That's how you want to be in a relationship. Then you can lean against your partner so that they almost get off balance. That's not healthy. And then you can feel a partner leaning against you so you're almost getting off balance. That's not healthy. We want to have two healthy individuals strongly individuated on their own who come together to support one another but aren't leaning on each other. The key here is we want to take 100% responsibility for our lives and our partner takes 100% responsibility for their lives. And together we can flourish. But when we start blaming other people for our experience, which means we're taking less than 100% responsibility, then our relationship is going to suffer. I talk about it more in the notes. Big idea. They talk about the fact that when you have ideals, you're going to drift. Drift happens. But when we drift, we want to get back into the flow, the harmony that we want to see. The way we do that is by having an openness to learning. And we've got some ideas here about specific things we can do. And then we want to recommit. Remember this word? Recommitment. It's one thing to commit to being a better husband or wife or spouse or father or mother or business partner, whatever. Commitment is nice. It's very, very important. But then we need to recommit when we don't feel like it or when we find ourselves doing the opposite of what we just said we would do. Commitment. Oops, we drifted. Recommitment. Be that person we committed to being. Recommit. Recommit. Recommit. Really big idea. I've got some other awesome ideas I'm not going to have time to get into right now. One other big idea. Telling the truth. If you aren't telling the truth in your relationships again with anyone in your life, you're going to disintegrate. You're out of integrity, not telling the truth, you're going to disintegrate. Not a good thing. Get into truth telling. If you have a truth you haven't shared, you may want to think about having what gay calls a five minute. A sweaty, five minute conversation. Have that conversation. Sweaty palms, you know, but have it. You'll break through and create this extraordinary energy. Good stuff. So that's gain. Katie Hendrix. Check them out@hendrix.com and on Facebook. Hope you dug it and really excited to share my love and my relationship with you in the future. Have an awesome day. See you.
