Tim Arrigo coaches couples to treat marriage like a goal-driven system with KPIs and milestones. He prescribes feeling wheel check-ins 2–3 times weekly, mutual 1–5 ratings, feedback on improvements, and weekly questions about supporting each other.
Or have you been pretty successful in your career? Yes. Yes. Okay. So I want to point something out. Everything that you've done to establish success in your career. Okay. Okay. All, all of those skills and all this success is there for a reason. And that's primarily because you've KPI'd around it. You've established milestones, key performance indicators, and specific metrics and goals that you've had inside your career that has driven your reward system to become addicted and, you know, intentional about what you're trying to achieve inside your career. You can do the same exact thing inside your, your, your life and your marriage. To me, what it sounds like is that you're not actually clear about the goals that you have inside your marriage. And what you could do to start changing this is you can actually start wiring your reward system around goals and KPIs inside your marriage. Okay, so basically in the beginning when you meet your wife, you meet your wife, the first initial goal is, right, I want to get close to her. I want to take her out on a date. Okay, you secure that. Okay. I want to, you know, get married and you secure that. Okay. I want to have a family. You do that. I want to buy a house. Okay. You do that. I want to, I want to, you know, make my career or business better. That way I can provide for my family more. Okay. I've done that. And then at a certain point in time, we kind of just fall off this proverbial cliff. Because we haven't established any real goals inside our marriage, anything that we're actively working towards. So the first thing you could do is feeling wheel check-ins with your wife. I would mandate these 2, 3 times a week. I would get out the feeling wheel. Okay, take out the feeling wheel. What I'll do with the feeling wheel, right, is I will pull up the feeling wheel. And what I'll do is I'll just share where I'm at, and I'll let my wife go first. Okay, so really quick, where are you at? Um, right now, you know, maybe she says that she feels, uh, overwhelmed, she feels anxious, and she feels, uh, you know, maybe, uh, perplexed or confused. Okay, so you're in the surprised, you're in the fearful. Okay, then I share where I'm at. So you let her share how she's feeling, then you share how you're feeling. And I can give you— I can send you something on all this. Share how you— share how she's feeling, and you share how you're feeling. Okay, then what I want you to do directly after that Okay, is I want you to ask her, just say, on a scale of 1 to 5, how did I do this week as a husband? Rate me on a scale of 1 to 5. She'll rate you, and then you're going to ask her, where could I have done better? She's going to give you back your feedback. Great. Then she— if, if she can handle this, if she's not triggered by it— okay, go ahead, Andrew, you rate me. Then you're going to give her a rating, scale of 1 to 5. Not an opportunity to dig at each other passive-aggressively, an opportunity to offer an actual objective Right, objective number. Okay, where you're actually at. Then she's going to say, where could I have done better this week? You're going to give her the feedback on that. Okay, directly after that, okay, what I want you to do is I want you to ask her, how can I support you this week? She's going to give me an answer. Then you're going to say, how could— then she's going to say, how could I support you this week? And you're going to give her the feedback. Start these feeling wheel check-ins with your wife immediately. Number one. So the feeling wheel check in with your wife needs to be mandatory for you. You got a KPI around your marriage and you have to have something you're working towards. I think that for you, it's far more easier for you to stay focused and stay engaged and stay interested and passionate when you know what you're trying to achieve. Like when you have an objective. And a lot of times for us, like we, we know things need to change, but it's too, it's not It's not practical enough. It's not, well, what am I supposed to be doing today? What can I be working on? The Feeling Wheel check-in with your wife is a great way to start doing that. You check in with the feelings, you give a mutual rating, you ask for feedback about where you could do better, right? And then the last step is you ask her, how I could support you this week? And then she says, how could I support you this week?
