Stop Blaming Your Wife

Yeah, Tim, I want things to change, but my wife just keeps triggering me and she holds me back from my true potential. Wait, what? Who holds you back from your potential? You hold you back from your potential. Nobody's holding you back from your true potential. Look at the man in the mirror. That's the person that's holding you back from your true potential. And the only reason that that person's holding you back from your true potential is because of the justification, the minimization, the rationalization, the bargaining, the comparing, the excuses, the minimizing. You manipulate yourself. Your biggest problem is your self-manipulation, and your self-manipulation gets you caught in these snares, these bear traps. And what happens? You get caught in it, and then what do you do? You tell yourself a lie as a way to escape having to deal with it, and that's the way you've lived your life. Oh, I'll be the aggressor in my relationship. I'll be the avoider in my relationship. I'll blame my wife for why I'm not living at my full potential and use that as a scapegoat to rationalize, justify, minimize, and bargain with my self-destruction, with my lack of character, with the fact that I'm not the man that I look up to. I'm not the man that I admire, that I respect. But yet I expect respect from my wife, but I don't even respect myself. Get offended at my wife's boundaries, but I don't even have boundaries with myself. Can't even keep my word, but my wife is the one that's holding me back from my potential, right? No. Maybe the reality isn't that your wife is holding you back from your potential. Maybe your potential is inside of the problems you're having with your wife, because changing your marriage means changing the man that shows up to the marriage, because then you get a different marriage. Maybe the problem— maybe the character-building potential that you're looking for is in the problems inside your marriage. You're seeing it as a problem rather than an opportunity. You're seeing it as a problem when you have every opportunity right there, right in front of you. To prove your potential. It's not holding you back. She's offering you an opportunity to level up, to become the man that she needs, to become the father you need to be, to become the leader that you need to be inside that home. Why are you not that guy? Because I know for me, when I wasn't that guy, I couldn't respect myself, and I had to lie to myself. I had to manipulate myself. I had to live in denial about how I was living my life. And I had to blame everybody else just to not have to live in self-induced shame and guilt every day. The cognitive dissonance, the disharmony you feel inside your chest. And so you have two choices: change what you believe or change what you're doing. Either change what you believe— that I don't need to be a man of honor, that I don't need to be a man of character, that I don't need to be a man that I respect, that I look up to. I don't need to be a man of valor, of courage, of honor. I don't need to be that guy. Either change what you believe and start to settle for some low-level mentality about who you should be inside of a relationship, or change what you're doing. Change your behavior. But you can't live in the gray area. This land of ambiguity that you live in is killing you because you start to live in the apathy. You're apathy. You're apathetic. And how can you not see that your apathy is destroying your business? Because why? You get filled up at home. You find passion at home. You find romance at home. You relieve stress at home. You connected home. And so you're going to expect that you can continue to put off this problem inside of your marriage, hide out in your business, and that somehow you're not going to simultaneously blow the two up at the same time? Because it's all connected. It's all connected because it's all connected to you. It's not 5 different things going on in your life. You as a father, you as a businessman, you as a husband, they're all connected because they're connected to you. That's why you got to go on the inside to fix it. It's not a problem outside of you. It's not your wife holding you back from your potential. The only thing holding you back from potential is the man that you're looking at when you look in the mirror. Have that conversation with him.