PNTV: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman (#299)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman. The seven Principles for Making Marriage Work Subtitle A practical guide from the country's foremost relationship expert. John Godman is the world's leading expert on the science of what makes relationships work. We're going to talk about this in the first Big Idea. Extraordinary stuff. He's been doing research for 42 years, has the data to demonstrate and to show what actually works. Of course, the book has seven principles which we're going to look at. A few of my favorites here. We've got the Philosopher's Note with a bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorites here. We'll start with the data. So, 91%. That's the accuracy rate that John Gottman has in predicting whether a couple will stay together or get divorced. 91%. He can predict after watching them in what he calls his love lab up in Washington, right. He has couples come in and they hang out over the course of a weekend and he asks them to talk about a challenging topic, right? And how they interact with one another while they argue, essentially is what gives him the information he needs in order to predict with 91% accuracy which couple is going to divorce and which couple is going to stay together. 91%. That's crazy. And he says, it's not my intuition. Very important point. It's data. And he says, look, there's a big difference between data and opinion. And the reality is that most marriage therapists and most books on the subject of relationships are based on opinion. And he says, my work is based on data. 42 years worth of data of what works. And again, this is what drives his 91% accuracy. So this is why I love the book. It's my number one recommendation. If you want to read a book on how to optimize your relationship, I highly recommend you make this your number one choice. Again, I'm a huge fan of positive psychology, the science of optimizing and actualizing. And a lot of the opinion just isn't effective. One of the examples is this idea that you shouldn't be arguing. Essentially you just need to improve certain aspects of your communication, which John shares. Some really powerful ways to improve our communication, but it runs counter to a lot of the opinion out there. And the fact is that you can have a great relationship and, and still have conflict. He asked these couples to be in conflict, right and it was how they interacted during that time that actually drove the results in the note. We'll put it in the info below his website. Check it out. He's got a list of trained therapists. If I ever needed to go see a therapist, it would be in this school of thought. Highly recommend that as well. So data versus opinion. 42 years of data, 91% accuracy. The seven principles are what the happy couples embrace. Whether they do it consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant. They do these things. One of my favorite ideas is the second big idea we're going to cover, which is to cherish. He says that healthy couples have a really, really strong foundation of friendship. They cherish one another. They have fondness and appreciation. I just love that word, cherish. To cherish your partner. He says, you can look at couples, you can ask them to describe their early days. And if the couples can't describe their early days with affection and fondness and enthusiasm and just appreciation for how awesome it was in those early days, that's a really strong sign that something's amiss. Right? If you can't even remember the early days when you fell in love with positive sentiment, then you don't need a news flash there. You got some issues. Right? So one of the ways to preserve this fondness and appreciation is to actually deliberately practice it and to think about those amazing, special moments. Right? Talk about them. Oh, I remember our first date when we did this, and that was awesome. I actually extended this idea in the class I just taught on Fatherhood 101. Doing this for our kids, cultivating the fondness and appreciation. It works for relationships. It also works for our kids celebrating the. The special moments in the midst of all the mundane. Right? So this is exciting, this idea of cherishing. And he's got a great exercise. The book is packed with exercises on how to cultivate your fondness and admiration. One of them was to look at a list of qualities that he listed kind of virtues and different qualities and figure out which of the qualities, which 10 are your favorite qualities in your significant other in your spouse. Right? And I did this. I read this book as part of Alexandra's birthday in her anniversary celebration. And really leaning in. We're in our 10th year. We just celebrated our ninth anniversary, and we want to make the last year in our first decade the best. How do we do that? Right? So I read this book, and then I did this exercise, and I created a love letter that I share in the note to Alexandra where I captured my top 10 favorite qualities that she has that I most cherish, that I most love. And I've recommended a lot of exercises in all these different notes. This is perhaps the most important. Relationships are so important. And Gottman makes the point again and again and again that just investing a little bit of time in your relationship has a way bigger return than even exercise. Right? Healthy relationships predict longevity and, and vitality. Therefore, it's wise to prioritize our relationships. And I think this is a really, really cool exercise. So imagine that. Imagine writing a love letter to your love where you identify. And of course, I did mine in the context of my top 10 reasons why I love you. Everything I do is five in these sessions and 10 in my masterclasses. So I had the top 10 reasons. Think about that. Spend the time and give it to your spouse or significant other as a gift. These are the 10 things I most cherish about you. It's really cool. I was surprisingly moved by it. And super fun exercise. So write yourself a love note. Honor one of the seven principles, cherishing, fondness and admiration. Third big idea is to turn toward. So John talks about how one of the things he looks at in this 91% is how the individuals respond to one another, right? And he says that couples are always making bids for one another's attention, Right? So I can ask you a question or I can say something or whatever, and that's a bid for your attention. In a relationship right now, the healthy couples turn toward their partner when they make a bid. Oh, you just made a bid. I'm going to turn toward you. I'm going to listen to you versus turning away. And he talks about one of the ways that we turn away these days is to our iPhones. We're more interested in the game we're playing or the news we're reading or whatever just blew us up than we are in our partner. Not a smart decision. We want to go deep with our partners and turn toward them and answer their bids. And he says, look, the whole Hollywood conception of romance is totally off. It isn't the big moments that create great relationships and that make marriages work. It's the tiny little bids and consistently turning toward our partners. And the predictability of the correlation between those who turned toward and turned away was crazy in terms of the divorce rates of those who turned away versus those who turned toward. So find the tiny little mundane things. John says, look, when your spouse says, hey, when you're shopping at the grocery store, do you know if we have any butter? Or whatever? And you can kind of say, Oh, I don't know. That's turning away. The bid is, hey, I think we may need some butter. And if you say, I don't know, but I'll go get it, that's turning toward. He says, that's unbelievably more powerful than the big things you think you need to do. You put together, you aggregate a bunch of those little things and you compound it over time, and you have a really, really awesome, thriving relationship. Turning toward, responding to bids. Fourth big idea is another good one, he says, and he talks about the different ways you can enter conflict. And there are some important qualities you need to embrace. You can check out the book for more of them that, again, are based in his data. Good stuff. But he says at the end of the day, it's actually really simple. Have good manners. If you treated your spouse the way you treat a house guest, if a house guest comes over and accidentally spills their wine and you don't yell at them, you say, oh, no big deal. I'll just clean it up and get you a new glass. And no, not a problem. You're not going to just berate them for destroying your best tablecloth and wasting the wine or whatever. This is not how it's going to work. You have good manners with strangers. You just need to use those good manners with your spouse. It's a really, really powerful idea and pretty funny. And he also makes the important point that, as I mentioned before, every couple argues. There's not one couple on the planet that has never had an argument. Right? And he says it's helpful to identify solvable arguments versus unsolvable arguments. Just, you guys are just different in different ways. Right. And it's been awesome for me to notice. Wow, I used to get all up in my stuff on unsolvable arguments. Alexander and I just have different standards for different things. And I can make a wrong for that, or I can just look and say, look, we have personality differences. So it's part of the reason why I love her is that she's not me. Right? Unsolvable. I'm going to be cool with it. And then we have solvable differences which can be addressed and we can work on. Right? But just the important point I want to make here is it's not that having arguments by itself is bad. It's how we approach them. And if we approached them with good manners and being polite as we expressed our desires and concerns, we'd get a long way. Fifth big idea is actually in the very end of John's book, he talks about the importance of reducing your self criticism. If you want to reduce your other criticism. If you want to quit criticizing your spouse, quit criticizing yourself. And if you have a difficult time saying the I in I love you, you're going to have a difficult time being as present as you can be in a thriving relationship. And John talks about the fact that for him, when reducing his own self criticism, his perfectionistic tendencies was a great vehicle for improving the quality of his relationship. And the reality is, if we're constantly seeing the flaws within ourselves, that's what we're going to focus on in other people. All of us have flaws. As we joke often, Abraham Maslow said, there are no perfect human beings. You and I are not going to be the first. And when we can embrace that, we can truly say I love myself and I'm comfortable with who I am, that then we're in a much better position to be comfortable and loving to our significant other and others. And then of course, the first big idea in Love 101 that Alexandra and I taught was to take care of your fundamentals. If you're not eating, moving and sleeping and just being physiologically healthy, there's no way you're going to consistently show up with intimacy and connection and presence in your dynamic relationship. So take care of that. Know what your number one self care habit is and take care of your eyes so you can effectively say I love you. Have good manners, treat your most significant other like you would a house guest. It's not complicated. Turn toward bids. Notice if you tend to turn away and focus on other things. Ah, TV is more important to me. Or that text message I just got is more important to me. Remember the iPhone effect? I'm going to keep on repeating this. The iPhone effect. Simply having your iPhone out, even if you aren't the rat that's constantly looking at it, which is obviously crazy. Just having an invisible sight diminishes the quality of interactions with people who are around you. So respond to your bids positively. Cherish. Think about this love letter that you can write to your significant other. One of the most, if not the most powerful exercises you can do. Then remember Data driven science 42 years, 91% accuracy. Awesome book. Highly recommend it. Again, check out his site for a bunch of other resources. Thank you John for a great book. What was your favorite big idea and how can you implement it starting today? Get on that. And I should also note Alexandra's encouragement to really invest more energy into our relationship is why I read this book. I've had it forever. But I'm always into the peak performance and all the other stuff, right? And it was really her bringing up saying, look, let's spend some more time. We've been so focused on parenting and so focused on creating. Let's spend more time investing in our relationship. John says that women almost always are the ones to bring up areas for improvement and optimization. So ladies know that that's the case. I someone who's really into this stuff was even reluctant to get into it. There's always more stuff to do, so. So if your guy's a little reluctant, be cool with it. And guys, this is an awesome book. This is super important. I'm thrilled that I invested the time and energy into it. It's already paid extraordinary dividends. Just making subtle distinctions in getting a little bit better and a little bit closer and just practicing stuff that works more and more consistently. So there you go. Hope you enjoyed. Have another awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian John. To find out more, go to Optymyze Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note, if you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.