Get Your Relationships Right: How to Create Extraordinary Relationships with Garrett Gunderson - Genius Network Episode #74

Would you like to know three secrets from couples who have had some of the best and most loving marriages in the world. Garrett learned them after a shocking truth prom from his wife and shares them with you in this episode of Genius Network. Garrett Gunderson is founder and chief wealth architect of Wealth Factory and New York Times best selling author of Killing Sacred cows. Overcoming the financial myths that are destroying your prosperity. He's personally helped countless business owners create efficient wealth strategies that have fitness their unique strengths. Recorded live at the Genius Network annual event. If you would like access to the full video presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 74 that's geniusnetwork.com 74.

You're rich, right? How many of you are rich? Kind of a trick question. Well, first off, from a financial standpoint, you have to be in order to be part of this group to be staying at this hotel. Rooms here at a discounted rate of between $500 to $1,900 a night. Yet rich can mean more than money. It can also mean rich in your relationships with the one you love most. Now, my good friend Garrett Gunderson, who's going to present is known as a financial author. He is a New York Times bestselling author of Killing Sacred cows. But he knows how to do both, get rich financially and be in rich relationships. Being young, tall, very good looking because he is a handsome man, having hair like that might be an asset, but Garrett will tell you more than that. You're going to hear how to get your relationships right. Extraordinary marriage to the success formula. So let's show some love to the awesome and amazing Garrett Gunderson. Thank you.

So it was November of 2006. It was actually the day before Thanksgiving. And we're getting into our Bentley because he's talking about being rich. And you know, we're about to drive down from Park City, Utah to a place not so rich called Price, Utah, where I'm from, little coal mining town. And as we start driving, we're going through this great canyon, Spanish Fork Canyon, just great Valley, awesome trees, awesome day. And you know what, my wife and I have our best conversations on these kind of drives. And that's how the conversation started out. She was telling me that I was an extraordinary radio show host and an extraordinary speaker, which don't judge that. That's my wife talking, right? And she just kept saying extraordinary for a few things I'm feeling damn good at this time. And then she looks over at me and says but you're just an ordinary husband and father. Yeah. Moment of truth, right? Where have you had that? Like, have you had that in your life? You know, there's course corrections in life, and that's where you find that feather on your face, and you realize something's going on, and you make the shift, and then there's force corrections that hit you like a ton of bricks, which was that moment for me. All right, so here's the thing. She was saying I was extraordinary in areas where it's pretty difficult to be extraordinary for a lot of people. And within those areas, there was a success formula that was hidden to me. And I took the introspection assessment from Lifebook. So if you go to mylifebook.com, there's an assessment on 12 categories of life. What I found is that I was extraordinary in 10 categories, and I was ordinary in two. One was my health, and the other one was my relationship with my wife. And so rather than argue or fight, I got immediately emotional and I decided to do something about it. And what I found was in these other areas, there were things that I was doing on a regular basis to create success in my life that I wasn't doing in my life and in my marriage. So the first thing is I wasn't doing a weekly meeting with my wife where there's no kids around, no interruptions, no phone calls. But it was her and I sitting down and talking about what was going on in our life. You know, when you create a great future, like a bigger future like Dan would talk about, that's what really makes a marriage extraordinary. But a lot of people, when they get derailed and frustrated, they say it's a money problem, but the money problem gets them short sighted. It gets them off track. They're not thinking about this future that could be great. They're thinking about getting through something that's difficult, and life becomes about that conversation. And I think extraordinary relationships come from the conversations we have. So why not set aside the time uninterrupted every single week with the person or the people you love, and you go through and you have this conversation. Now, the first conversations went a lot like this. Couple good minutes, a couple bad minutes. Like, you know, hey, you're gone too much. This is going on. And then I started thinking, well, what else do I do? Yeah, I have these meetings, but I also have people that I look up to in other areas of my life. When I was doing radio, I was going, who do I look up to? And I was learning from them. So I went out and I said, here are the people that I think have the best meeting marriages in the world. John and Missy Butcher. Patrick and Laurie Giantempo. David and Nicole Jackson. I got Shawn Stevenson. We flew out to Chicago and I declared my commitment to my wife in front of them. We had a little ceremony, and I asked these guys, will you support us? See, this is a key distinction in life. We have people that are gonna be our friends, and we have people that we need to be only friendly with. And what I decided to do was anyone who didn't have an extraordinary relationship for six months, I wasn't spending any time with them. I'd be friendly because. But I would decline any invitation. And I'd only accept invitations from people who had great relationships. And I started to invite those people into my life. And that's why I started this off in Chicago, which, by the way, we had a second honeymoon out there that was off the charts because we got to stay in John and Missy's apartment. And they set up this great thing. Nice to be with rich friends that have good relationships. You know what I'm saying? There's some perks to that. Which, by the way, first call I ever had with Joey introduced me to John and Misty. So I thought that was pretty extraordinary. The second thing is I had to go through an exercise that I called the do Over. Guys, look back in your life, you've probably said or done something totally stupid. Here's the one that guys do all the time. I don't know if women do this, but they say, I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this to put food on the table. That is a bunch of shit. You're not doing this just to put food on the table. In this world today, with the capacity in this room, we can put food on the table in our sleep. It is easy. We do it because we love it. But we miss out on other things we love. Because you're gonna hear from Robert Hirsch in a little while talk about making it count. And we have the wrong metrics of what matters in life. And see, in my 20s, I didn't redefine what successful was. It was having a whole bunch of money. Cause I came from a coal mining town. And so it was work, work, work. And when people said, what are your hobbies? I'm like, I work. Thanks for saving me from that, Babs. I appreciate that. So I had to do a do over where I went to my wife and I said, remember that time I said this? And she'd say, uh huh. I say, I don't know who said that, but that was absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever heard come from someone's mouth. I hope that you can forgive me. And it literally melted the walls. The next thing is, when I invest in things, they tend to grow. So I started to invest in things. I invested in Dino Watt, who happens to be here. He had a program called Business and Marriage, which took me about a year to convince my wife to go to, because it wasn't like counseling or anything, but it was like, hey, you have systems of success in your life, why not set them up in your business? So we hired Dino, we started spending time with him, and we had some major breakthroughs because he didn't care that I was his number one referrer. He still held me accountable in every single one of those meetings. So I started doing that. Spend time with the right people, choose who I'm gonna be friendly with instead of friends with. Invite the friends into my life, look for people that I can learn from and get best practices from them. So one of the best practices was date night. So I have a date night every single week with my wife. And here's the thing, it's not some dinner and movies thing. I have a list of great ideas so that when it comes time for date, it's part of a system that we're gonna have an extraordinary date night because we might go to our date night pad that I got downtown that we go cook and go do something there. We might go to a concert, we might go up to the Montage at Park City, one of our favorite places, which is. That's what we did last week, Hot air balloon ride, which got canceled because I was scared as hell. So I was kind of glad. But, you know, I'm trying to be romantic and shit. So the weekly meeting is critical. And you know what? I've created an agenda and I'm going to share that agenda with all of you. The other two things I'm gonna share with you is an interview that John Butcher did with me after I went through this transformation. And what's great about the interview, you're not hearing it from my perspective. You're hearing my wife talk about it. And I tried to convince her early on when this was difficult. Why don't we put each other first? I know we have kids, I know we have other priorities, but let's just put each other first. And she's like, well, I can't. I got this with the kids and I got that with the kids and our life is becoming just wrapped up in our kids. But I said, try it on for a month. And I'm telling you, it changed everything because now I'm an example to my kids what it means to be a man, what it means to be a husband, what it means to be a romantic. And they can see that example. They can see that we have time for each other and it's not every little whim that they have. And then I had to convince my wife to invest in herself and have a nanny without feeling guilty so that she could take care of herself and go after purpose other than just being a mom. Right. And that brought a whole other world together for us. So here's. You know, I normally don't look at notes, but this isn't my normal talk. This is like my life I'm sharing here with you guys. You guys can go to freedomfasttrack.com marriage. There's no opt in. But it's also an interview I did with Dino with my wife, an interview I did with John with my wife. And then we also shared kind of our agenda that we use. Don't go through the whole damn agenda every week. Don't let it become an excuse. Just go through the parts that make sense. Brian, is this helpful when you started doing this? I know a lot of people have started to do this. So we also created some rules and structure. We have something called 1446. 14 nights internationally away from the kids, 4 nights if I'm gone more than 4 nights in any month, I'm taking days off during the week and I'm never home later than 6pm and no technology once I get home. Right. Completely changed how we operate, how we connect, I'm telling you. And it's hard in a marriage sometimes because, you know, in business you make a mistake and you get over it. In a marriage, it's like that shit can come back to haunt you for a while, right? Or they'll remind you when you're in another fight or something like that. So it's nice to have got through this, but I'm going to end with, this is the key, this is the secret. And we've heard it from so many speakers up here talking over and over again. You got to have vision in your business. You got to have a mission in your business. You got to be clear about what you want. You know, the Rockefeller habits. You talk about JFK saying we're going to send a man to the moon and return him safely home within this decade. Clear cut, not something that lives nebulously in the mind, but something that lives in the heart. Have you done that for your marriage? Do you have that vision? Have you articulated that in your marriage or your key relationships? Because I have. I'm an extraordinary husband and a premier romantic. Now, I haven't rode in on a horse with my shirt off, but about anything else for my wife, I've pretty much done. And I love to baby her and I love to take her out on date night and she can have input about date night. But I'll tell you what I want to take care of that way and make those choices. On Mondays, though, when we do our weekly meeting, that's where we handle the finances. That's where we handle the travel. So guess what? The rest of the week is freed up for us to talk about vision, what we're excited about, positive focus, and what makes life great. So thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event, please visit Genius network event, that's geniusnetworkevents.com if you would like access to the full video presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 74 that's geniusnetwork.com 74.