But I just have to say, things are weird right now. I don’t care where you live, what socioeconomic status you have, how many children you have, how old you are, we all feel something is weird, is off. And I’ve noticed it in coaching my clients and in our membership and with my friends where we’re trying to put a good face on it. I think everyone’s like, oh, I’m, I’m doing okay. We’re fine. You know, same old, same old. But we’re also looking around at the news and the world going, what is going on? And there are so many different versions of what is going on right now that it’s hard to know what is up and what is down. And this episode is not about any one of those things.

But these are some of my, kind of like the five top things that I’ve been really working on it, in my marriage and, and I’m just excited to share them with you today. And I want you to stick around to the end because the fifth tip I’m gonna share with you has been something that has been kind of new for me, which has been kind of fun and exciting, and I cannot wait to share it with you. And I just wanna say this before I dive into these five tips. The thing about marriage and, and, and so many of our relationships are that it takes two people, right? We talk about marriage being a union, a partnership between two people. And so a lot of the ways that we know marriages are going to be strengthened and improved is if both people are really working at these strategies and, and doing these things.

But I also wanna say this, we as women, as wives, we can really take some of these strategies that I’m gonna share with you today to heart, and we can start practicing them and improving them or strengthening them and, and doing these things, whether our husband is, is reciprocating or not. And I’m gonna share a little bit more, even at the end, kind of tying this all back together. So I think you’ll really see what I’m talking about. But a lot of times when we maybe sometimes feel stuck in our marriages or we feel frustrated or we feel like we want the other person to change in certain ways and they’re not and we get discouraged, we, we sometimes avoid trying new things like maybe some of the things that I’m gonna share in this podcast. But I want to encourage all of us that we can try new things.

And oftentimes when we try new things or we work at something, or we put effort into something, our spouse or whoever it is in the relationship that we’re maybe struggling with, they often see our efforts and will in a lot of ways start to reciprocate. So we’re not necessarily doing these things to change the other person, but what we often do see is that if we make these efforts, if we try new things, if we go out of our way a little bit, it can have a massive impact on the relationship. And so this is what I’m excited to, to really dive into today. So let’s get going. Alright, tip number one, praying for our husbands. Now, of course I know you’re thinking, yes, yes I do. I pray for my husband and obviously like, I’m gonna start with that tip. This is a Catholic podcast.

I’m gonna start with this tip. And I think that we all do, we pray for our husbands, we pray for our kids, we pray for our marriages, all of that. But what I’m talking about is being very intentional about praying for our husbands every single day. And I wanna ask you, are you doing that? Are you praying very intentionally for him every single day? And if the answer is no, then what if today changes that? What if we start saying, you know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get very intentional, I’m gonna pray for him every single day. It doesn’t have to be like an entire rosary. It doesn’t have to be 10 or 15 minutes long. It can be a simple prayer at the beginning of the day or at a certain point, praying for him and his knees, his intentions, his work, his job, his heart, like all of those things in a very specific and intentional way.

And one of the things that I have been starting to do in my own prayer life is do what people call habit stacking. Now I call it prayer slash habit stacking. And if you’re not familiar with habit stacking, what habit stacking is, is if you have a new habit that you want to create, then you stack it with a habit that you already have in place. So, for example, if you have a habit every morning to drink a cup of coffee, you may decide that, okay, every morning at a certain time, I’m gonna drink a cup of coffee. But five minutes before that, I want to start every day doing 25 sit-ups. Let’s just say it like that’s one of your goals. You want to create a new habit of doing 25 sit-ups every morning. So what you would do is you would say, okay, every morning before I drink my cup of coffee, I’m gonna do 25 sit-ups, and then I’ll drink my cup of coffee.

So you already know that you’re gonna drink your cup of coffee every day, but you add in the sit-ups and within like a week or two, your brain just knows, like, before I drink my cup of coffee, I’m gonna do these sit ups. And you create another habit that is tied into a habit that you already have set in place. So I noticed this when I used to drive to work every day a couple years ago. I drove to work and every time I turned onto the main street, like going out of my neighborhood, I used to always say my morning offering prayer. And that just like, I just knew, like when I turned onto that street, which was kind of part of my daily habit, it was my daily drive, I would do my morning offering prayer. And it just became a daily habit for me.

So much so that as soon as I turned onto that corner, like I would notice myself making the sign of the cross and starting that prayer without even realizing it, it was like my, my brain and my heart and everything was just like an on autopilot almost in a way of doing that. The funny thing about this is now I work from home and so I don’t get up in the morning and drive. I don’t drive to work, but of course I’m out and about in the afternoons or picking my kids up from school. But this is amazing. Every time I turn onto that street, my brain automatically puts me into prayer mode where I start doing my morning offering. Even if it’s maybe like three in the afternoon, my brain just automatically kicks in, oh, we’re turning onto this street, saying this prayer, and it’s so powerful.

So I wanna encourage you to think about prayer slash habit stacking for your husband. Are there times in your day or is there a time in your day that you do something every day? Maybe it’s brush your teeth in the morning, or when you’re getting into your shower or making your cup of coffee, whatever it could be that that becomes the new time, that right before you do that, or right as you’re doing it, you are praying for him. If you do this every day for the next seven, seven days or two weeks, if you do it every single day and you stop and you say a prayer for him, it will become a habit tied into that. And so every time you do that, every time you go to step into the shower, or every time you go to brush your teeth in the morning, your brain is gonna trigger, trigger you to pray for him.

And then the really fun thing is coming up with creative ways that you can pray for him daily. That’s very, you know, specific to maybe whatever’s going on in, in his life, whether it’s work related or praying for him as a father, praying for healing in his life, praying that God would help to reveal his profound love for him, praying for his safety, his well being, all of these things. I also wanna share with you that we have a 14 day Love Your Husband challenge, where it’s a free 14 day email. If you haven’t done it, I wanna invite you to go to our website made for greatness.co and just sign up for it. All you have to do is put your email in and it will send you 14 days of emails where you can be thinking about your husband and praying for him and doing these little challenges throughout those two weeks.

It’s really powerful. And a lot of the women, I mean, we’ve had I think maybe 7,000 or 8,000 women so far that have gone through this challenge. And we get a lot of emails from them when the challenge is over. One of their most favorite things about the challenge is getting that daily email with a daily prayer that they pray for their husbands. And it’s very beautiful, and I think this might be a great opportunity to, to do that, to start creating a habit of praying very intentionally for him every single day. And that email is a, is a powerful way to get started with that. Even if you’ve already done this challenge, you can always go back and do it again. You may be surprised how much even more you get out of doing it a second time. So that is my tip number one, praying very intentionally for him every single day.

All right, tip number two, kindness ladies. I read an article a couple weeks ago, and I am so bummed because I cannot find it now, but it was all about marriages and these psychologists and people who had been studying marriages for many years and all of these couples and, and looking at successful marriages over long periods of time. And they talked about, of course there’s some key factors in marriages that help them to be successful and to last a long time. Things like obviously communication, intimacy, you know, all of these things, faith, all of it. But one of the main common denominators that showed up in this study was the virtue of kindness and how they saw that that quality in marriages were key, were key for marriages that were thriving. And it’s funny because I went back to try to find this article because I wanted to reread it before I did this podcast.

And when I typed in articles about marriage and kindness, there were like so many different articles over there, like many that I read through all with similar things about marriages and statistics and all of these studies and all of these things really highlighting this key characteristic and really successful marriages, the virtue of kindness. And it made me start to really think about that, like what does kindness look like? And I know that it’s one of those things that may be a little bit different for everyone, but really you could understand why couples that are really kind to each other tend to be thriving marriages. And it’s so funny because in a lot of ways the person that we’re married to, they see us at our worst and in our best. And you know, we’ve been through so much and you’re with that person for, you know, long, for many years, long periods of time.

And it’s very easy to start taking that person for granted, for just getting comfortable and familiar. Sometimes that is the person that is the easiest to be irritable and snappy and we easily get frustrated when we take things out on our spouse, all of these things. And so I just think it’s really cool to learn and to think about those things and to say, you know, to have some times to like just check in. Like, am I really being kind to him? I know that I can look at, at my marriage, I can do some like, kind of deep dives into self-awareness and say, yeah, there’s probably been a lot of times that I actually wasn’t very kind to my husband or, you know, it’s very easy to just be short and irritable. It’s also like we think about kindness and a lot of times we will go out of our way to be really kind to strangers or people we work with or people at church, our neighbors acquaintances.

And yet how many times do we come home and we often leave kindness at the door and then we come in and we just treat our spouses, we treat our kids sometimes just with a lack of kindness. And for me, since I read that article, it’s been kind of at the forefront of my mind and I’ve been checking myself in this area and looking for ways that I can be more intentional about being more kind to my husband and like, what does that really look like? And I think it can show up in a lot of different ways. Obviously in the way I talk to him in the tone of voice that I use in my presence, I think there’s kindness in smiling and affection and just even being interested in the things that he’s saying or the things that he’s talking about or in his requests, things like that.

And this is definitely an area where I know I can improve significantly, but I love having things that I know I can work on. And kindness is actually one of those things that’s not hard. It’s not hard to be kind, it just takes a little bit of effort. And this is one of those areas too that not just in our marriages, like with our children and with the people that are closest to us, what if we all just worked at being a little bit more kind? And the cool thing about kindness is it’s one of those things that if, if you are working at it, like if you’re trying to be more kind and more friendly and present and attentive, like those types of qualities, when you show up like that, it’s just almost automatic that people are gonna reciprocate. It’s kind of like one of those things, if you’re out and about and you smile at someone, chances are they’re gonna smile back. If you hold the door for someone, they’re probably gonna hold the door for you. If you do an act of kindness for somebody, it’s gonna come back to you. And so for me, I just, I love this and it’s something that I wanna work on and it’s one of my tips and I think it’s very cool. It’s a very cool tip that we can all, we could all like to level up our kindness . I have no doubt about that. And it’s not that hard and it’s totally free and it’s very cool. All right, so that’s my tip number two. Tip number three is honesty. And I could spend a lot of time on this one, but I’m not gonna spend a lot of time, obviously, honesty, transparency, all of those things are important, but what I actually wanna focus more on right now is, kind of this concept of honesty slash assertiveness.

And what I mean by this is for a lot of us, especially as women, it’s hard for us to be assertive. And so like, when we’re talking about honesty, what I, what I’m really talking about is just telling our husbands what we want . And so I don’t know whether you wanna call it honesty or assertiveness or kind of a combination of both. This is really one of those communication skills that I think a lot of us could work on. Now granted, you might be listening to this and say, you might be thinking, gosh, I have no problem telling my husband what I want. And if, if you are there like, great, yay, high five for you because that is awesome and it’s probably been helpful in your marriage because a lot of times men really appreciate knowing what we want, whether it is a gift, you know, like a birthday gift or something that we have been wanting, like to just tell our husbands what it is because I have spent so many years kind of, you know, maybe dropping hints and that have been very vague or wishing for something or wanting him to do something or wanting him not to do something.

And I’ve just kind of been vague. I haven’t been very honest and open and clear in my communication. And whenever that happens, it always usually leads to frustration, resentment, discouragement, you know, animosity, a lot of negative emotions that aren’t really necessary if we just communicate. And if we’re honest and we tell our spouse what we need, what we want. So for example, if it’s Christmas time and you want a purse, tell him what kind of purse you want. Tell him what brand, take a picture of it or like send him a picture, send him a link to where he can buy it. Just be like, this is what I want for Christmas. And I promise you he’ll be like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I can get my wife exactly what she wants and I will be the hero and I will be the man and everything will be good.

And I don’t have to worry about getting her something and spending money on something that she doesn’t want. Same thing with like, these are things, little things I’ve learned. Like I’ll say something to my husband like, oh, you know, our anniversaries are coming up and I would, I would just love some fresh flowers. Now that sounds pretty assertive, right? But the funny thing is, is that I will have an idea in my mind of the kind of flowers I want. And our wedding anniversary is in May. And so in my mind I’m kind of envisioning like this beautiful spring flower arrangement, maybe with some PS and some, you know, lilies or just like I, I usually like have this idea and maybe I’ll see something on Pinterest or I’ll see , something in a flower shop that’s just like this beautiful bouquet. And, but if I tell my husband, oh, I would just love some flowers.

Guess what he’s gonna get me? He’s gonna get me flowers, but they’re probably gonna be like a dozen red roses, which I love too. But there’s times that I’m like, oh, I love something else. So now, I’m just trying to get better at just telling him like, oh my gosh, check out this bouquet of flowers. I, this is what I would love if, if you were to gimme flowers, this is the kind of bouquet I would love. And then again, he gets to feel like the hero. He gets me what I want. I’ve told him it’s very clear. And this can be, so this could be with anything, this could be with things that you want, like material things. This could be, you know, maybe you’re longing for just time alone with him or affection in a certain way. Just us being more clear and being a little bit more direct can sometimes go a really long way and it just makes things easier.

So this is like one of the tips I have been working on. And I have to tell you, I am probably the least assertive person I know. , this has not come easy for me. I have had to practice this. And it’s funny because I have seven children and my seventh child, my youngest daughter who just turned five, is incredibly assertive , it cracks me up. So I just kind of watch her and I’m like, I watch how she acts and she has no problem telling us what she wants or what she’s feeling or what she doesn’t like. And for me, as somebody who’s always been like a people pleaser and it’s always been really hard to communicate my desires or my wants, I am just blown away by it. And here I am at 46 years old, 46 years old, learning this skill.

But it is a skill. I mean, for some people they’re born with it. They learn it from an early age, but it’s never too late for us to start practicing it. And the more we practice it, the easier it gets. And I have just seen in my own marriage in the last few years that I’ve been really aware of this and working on this in my life, it has helped our marriage significantly. So that is my third tip. Honesty slash assertiveness being a little bit more, you know, just being honest and open in communication can go a long, long way. All right, tip number four, this has to do with our thoughts and I’ve already done a previous full episode on this, but I’m gonna just highlight it really quickly. You’ve probably heard me or Sterling say this, if you are in masters, you’ve heard us say this before, we’ve done a number of things on marriage and relationships and our thoughts and our mindset all on marriages.

But this is so significant. And when I started to understand what I’m about to share with you, it not only significantly impacted my marriage, but it has impacted most of my relationships in my life. And it comes down to this, the quality of our relationships will be determined by the quality of thoughts we have about the person. So my fourth tip is to improve your thoughts about your husband. Start practicing this. Now you might already have a lot of really great thoughts about him, that’s awesome. But I just wanna say this, like we can always be working on this and improving it. And for me, in my marriage, this has been a significant area. Again, it kind of ties in, like goes back to the very same thing about kindness. If we’re just really intentional about our thoughts and thinking really good thoughts about our husbands, it will help us.

And I know you might be thinking, well usually when I’m not having good thoughts about him, it’s because of his actions or his behaviors or things like that. And there is truth to that. But I want to challenge you. This is where we can take our thoughts captive and get very intentional. Like we can take control of our thoughts. The cool thing is that somebody could be doing something that is annoying or bothers you or you don’t like, and you can still choose the thoughts you have about them. And when you start doing that, you start to take back so much power in your life and control and you start to really step into emotional adulthood and determine how you want to feel about that person no matter what they’re doing or what they’re not doing. This is so incredibly powerful and if you think about when you first met your husband, when you were first, when you first met him, when you were first dating, you probably had all sorts of amazing, amazing emotions happening in your body that Twitter painted that oh my gosh, I’m so in love, this guy’s amazing.

He can do no wrong. You were having intense, intense emotions about him, most likely when you were first dating, when you were first falling in love. And the reason that those emotions were so strong and so intense were because of the types of thoughts you were thinking about him and the quantity of thoughts. You were probably thinking about him a lot and the quality of those thoughts that you were having were really great. Like, he’s amazing. He’s so good looking, he’s so incredible, he’s so funny, he’s so all of these things. And that was creating this firestorm of all of these incredibly intense, intoxicating, romantic, amazing emotions inside of you. It was your thoughts. And of course then we get married, we go on the honeymoon, we then we settle into life and of course life happens and we’re married to this person and all of a sudden they start being who they are and we start having different thoughts about them.

I can’t wait to talk to him. I can’t wait to fill his arms wrapped around me. You can actually feel those same emotions now in your marriage. However many years later, and I have been experiencing this 20 years into our marriage, I am starting to get very intentional about what I’m thinking about him, which is very positive thoughts about him. And it’s making me feel these emotions for him. And when I feel these emotions for him, then I show up in a completely different way. I’m more flirtatious, I’m more affectionate, I’m more present, I’m more excited, I’m more complimentary. And all of a sudden I have these moments where my heart just wants to explode because I am feeling all of these emotions again that I remember feeling early on in our relationship. But now 20 years later, they’re even more like, they’re bigger, they’re deeper, they’re more sincere.

And I think it’s just because our, you know, our relationship has matured, it’s grown. We’ve been through the most difficult times, the most amazing moments that we have, all these memories now and all of these incredible things that our marriage has been built on. But it’s still possible to have those really powerful and intense emotions. And we know those emotions are gonna come from the quality of thoughts, the quantity of thoughts, all of it. And so my sisters in Christ, this is where we have so much power and we can start practicing these things, these thoughts. And so I wanna encourage you, one of the things that I have done is like, I have sat down and wrote out the types of thoughts that I want to intentionally have about my husband, thoughts about how amazing of a man he is, how smart I think he is, how funny he is, how good looking I think he is.

All of these things like, and, and in very specific and detailed ways thoughts that evoke different types of emotions from appreciation and gratitude to attraction and you know joy and laughter and all of these things, things that I really love about him. And the more I practice those thoughts, the more I see those qualities in him. They kind of jump out at me more because I’m intentionally thinking about them. So my fourth tip is to get intentional about the thoughts that you want to think about him that are gonna evoke these really powerful emotions in you. And I like, we gotta try this because it’s just so easy to just get into our day-to-day routines where we’re thinking about the home and the kids and the responsibilities. And what am I gonna cook for dinner? That we will go days, weeks, months without ever even really stopping to be intentional about the thoughts that we’re having, about the most important man and the most important human relationship we have in our lives.

So this has to be one of those key ingredients in our marriage. And again, this is just like kindness. This is totally free. It does take a little bit of effort, it takes daily practice, but this has massive, massive payoffs. It’s an investment that is going to reap extraordinary rewards in our marriage. And I think this is one of those things that sets couples apart from kind of the average marriage. This is like how we level up our marriage is leveling up the thoughts that we’re thinking because we know for anyone that knows the model and has heard us talk about the model, the thoughts that we put into the model are gonna affect how we feel and those emotions that we feel are gonna drive our actions and then they’re gonna, they’re gonna get us to the results that we want in our lives.

So this is absolutely key. So this is my tit number four, manage our thoughts and take them captive and start like thinking very intentionally. And now my sister’s in Christ . This is my big one. And this is something that has really impacted me in the last maybe five or six months of my marriage. So here we are 20 years into marriage, and all of a sudden when you think that there’s nothing new and nothing exciting, all of a sudden something comes into the picture. And there’s actually, I could probably be, I could spend probably another hour or two on this podcast episode sharing with you a number of things, but I’m gonna like to save that for later. But this is my fifth tip, this is my secret tip. And it has to do with the thoughts that we think about ourselves.

So the, the, my tip number four is the thoughts that we’re thinking about him. Tip number five. And this is so fascinating to me and I’ve been putting this into practice and it’s just crazy, crazy cool stuff. So there’s kind of two parts to this one. The first one is like, what are the thoughts that we’re having about ourselves? How do we feel about ourselves? How do we want to feel about ourselves? And I guess really like, what are the thoughts that are gonna create those emotions? So real quick, like if you wanna think about what you wanna think about yourself that is gonna help you have a better marriage? What are some of those emotions? So for me, I think I want to feel like I’m confident that I’m loving, that I’m generous, that I’m kind, you know, that I’m present to my husband. Like these are the things that will help me, that I, that I feel like I am a sexy, attractive woman.

Like if I want to feel those things about myself, what are the thoughts that I need to think that are gonna help me to feel those emotions? So that is part of it. And so we need to take some time to really get intentional about those thoughts. But the second part, this is like a new thing and I’m, I may even struggle trying to articulate this because this is something I’ve been practicing, but I haven’t actually shared it with very many people yet. Cuz I’m still, I’m like, I’m just practicing this. But it’s like, it’s been awesome and what it is is the thoughts that I want to be thinking about what he’s thinking about me. , oh my gosh, you’re probably like, okay, Larisa, where are you going with this? So this is something I started doing a while back where I started to get very intentional about what I want my husband to be thinking about me?

And so I came up with all of these things that I, that I kind of want him to be thinking about me. And then from there I think about, okay, so what do I need to think about myself and what do I need to, how do I need to, to feel, how do I need to act towards him so that he is thinking those things about me? , and I’m gonna share some examples with you cuz this is, I know this is super vague. I’m still trying to find the vocabulary to really explain this, but I’m gonna, I’ll share with you. So like a while back, this was even probably like a couple years ago, we were going through kind of a difficult patch in our marriage where we were struggling a little bit. And I remember thinking cuz my husband had actually been engaged before we met.

And then obviously they broke that off. And then like a year or two later we met. And even myself, like I was in a serious relationship. I wasn’t, we weren’t engaged, but I had dated a man that I thought we were gonna get married to, but we ended up breaking up. And then a couple years later I met my husband, the man that I married to now. But I remember kind of going through this difficult time in our marriage a couple years ago and having this thought, like, I wonder if he had married the woman that he was engaged to before, or, you know, like he certainly could have married the, you know, somebody else other than me. But, and I remember thinking, what if he was married to someone else? And that woman loved him better than I am loving him right now.

I remember having that thought. I remember gosh, like thinking, okay, well like that kind of made me sad to think about and we were kind of going through this difficult time and, but it really made me think. And although it’s not super helpful to sit and think about that for a long time, it’s like a hypothetical question, but I do remember it making me, making me think, gosh, maybe I could be loving him better. And I also remember thinking, and even a couple months ago I was thinking if something happened to me and I got sick or I got cancer or I was in an accident and I, and I died, and then my husband, you know, down the road remarried, is it possible that he could marry someone and she might love him better than I have loved him. And so it really made me start thinking about that.

And again, these are totally hypothetical questions, but I had this moment where I was praying about our marriage and praying for him and asking God, like, like God, like really like thinking, you know, you brought us together, there’s a reason like this man you brought into my life for, for me. Like you knew that, that he would be helping me get to heaven and you brought him into my life for a reason and vice versa. Like I’m in his life for a reason. And so just like taking that to prayer was really beneficial and really powerful. But really about six months ago I had this moment where I was, I remember thinking to myself in prayer, like, I want to love this man better than anyone, anyone else, woman in the world could ever love him. And hopefully like I’ll my whole life and his whole life will be spent like for me to be able to love him to the very best of my ability.

But I wanna love him in my mind. Like I want to love him better and richer and deeper than anyone could love him. And even if like five years from now, if I was on my deathbed, I want to be able to pass from this life like believing in the depth of my heart that I just loved him as much as I possibly could. And so that had like, started me on this path of me really thinking about him and what kind of thoughts do I want him to be having about me. And then I kind of backtrack into like, how does that look for me? So for example, if I want my husband to think I am married to the most amazing woman, like if I imagine my husband thinking that about me, like what would I need to do? How would I need to act so that I know or I feel pretty confident that he’s thinking that about me?

And what’s really fun is when I ask that question to myself, my brain just shows me all of these things, like what I could do and how I can act and how I can treat him in a way that I’m pretty confident that he’s thinking, oh my gosh, like I am married to the most amazing woman. And so I have come up with like a number of different thoughts that I like, want to imagine my husband having about me when maybe it’s like when we’re not together or like if I’m, you know, if my husband is at work and I’m thinking to myself, okay, I know that tomorrow my husband’s gonna be at work all day, I’m not gonna see him, but what do I imagine or dream about or would love for him to be thinking about me when, when he’s at work tomorrow?

And it has really reshaped how I act. And it is like making, making it really fun to think about these things. Some of them are obviously about affection and intimacy, but when I think to myself like, I want my husband to think like, oh my gosh, my wife is absolutely amazing when it comes to intimacy. So, or like my wife absolutely likes, blows me away in this area. Like when I start to think about that and I think, what, what can I do? What can I do to surprise him in this, in this area of intimacy or affection or things like that. Like all of a sudden it makes it so much fun and creative to be thinking about these things. Or if I want my husband to think to himself like, I am married to a woman who is so in love with Christ, then it makes me think about like, what am what are the things that I’m doing?

How am I praying for him? How am I being a spiritual leader in my family? What are things that I could be doing to help that so that I feel confident that he’s thinking these things about me? And so I’ve come up with a number of things, whether it’s around our faith life, our communication, our intimacy, our, you know, just like our just time together, what that looks like. And I can tell you like this has been one of those like secret ingredients of just spicing up our marriage in all different areas, of our relationship, and it’s been super fun and I keep coming up with new thoughts and new ideas and new ways that I want to make sure that I’m loving him better than I can imagine any other woman loving him. Now I know that, that I would never know, right?

Like, I mean, there’s a chance that something could happen to me and he could marry someone else and she could love him amazingly. And if that were to happen, then that’s what I would want. But I want to have the kind of marriage where I believe that I am trying my best to love him better than anyone could ever love him. And of course, of course there are days and there are moments where I completely fall short of this. And I’m not trying to be perfect in this area. I know that I can’t be, but when I do think this thought like I wanna love him better than anyone else ever could love him, it makes me get really excited about showing up like that. And my brain starts coming up with all of these really cool and powerful ways of how I can do it.

And these types of things. Like, it’s funny because I don’t even, I don’t have to even tell him about this. Like I don’t, I don’t sit around and tell him, Hey, I want you to be thinking these things about me. I just got to do this. This is like all happening in my own head. And then I get to think about these things and imagine these things and then show up doing these things and acting in a certain way. And I can tell you this has significantly impacted our marriage. Like we are closer and we’re having more fun and our relationship has improved, our communication has improved. Our intimacy has improved. Like so many things have improved just because I’m practicing these things. And again, I wanna come back to this whole concept of when we do things oftentimes, like we can’t change someone else.

We can’t make someone else act a certain way or change their behavior or change their attitude or change their habits or change things. Like we can’t do that. The only person that we really have control over is ourselves. But when we start to make these changes and we start to make these shifts and we start to become more intentional about our thoughts and our emotions and our actions and the things we’re doing and the the areas that we’re trying to grow in or level up in, or whatever word you want to use to talk about growth and, and those types of areas in your life, like whenever we start taking responsibility and start doing those things, it’s only like natural that the other person is going to recognize it, is gonna fill it and is gonna oftentimes reciprocate or mirror it, especially if it’s behaviors that are consistent.

Now, if we just do it like once or twice maybe it’s not gonna really take root or take effect. But if we are every day praying for our husbands very intentionally, if we’re working at being more kind, if we’re really being honest and open in our communication, if we’re being intentional about the thoughts we’re having about him and the thoughts that we’re having about ourselves and getting excited about how we wanna show up and how we wanna love him, my goodness, like those are all game changers in our relationship. And that’s why I felt compelled to do this podcast episode. These are all things that I am working on in my own life and in my own marriage. And I have seen in real life the effect of these things. And the other thing that’s really cool is like, I haven’t had to ask my husband to change or to do anything, anything.

Like, I haven’t talked to him about these things. These are just things I’m working on myself and am seeing the fruits in. And finally, the other cool thing about these tips is that they don’t just work in your marriage. Now of course this podcast episode has all been about our marriages, but every one of these tips could be applied to any relationship and to improving any relationship. So if you want to improve your relationship with your teenage son or daughter, boom, here are your five like tips for improving it. Pray for them intentionally every single day. Be kinder to them, think about them. Be clear in your communication and think about the types of thoughts you want them to be thinking about you. And then start acting in accordance with that and boom, it’s a game changer. All of a sudden you’re like, what just happened here? This relationship just grew, this got, we became closer. We’re starting to see fruits in this relationship. So my sisters in Christ, this is what I have for you today, my five tips to strengthen your marriage, to strengthen any relationship. And of course, this is not an exhaustive list. There’s many more things that we could be doing, but even if you looked at this list of five things and maybe you thought to yourself, I’m actually doing pretty good. I’m in a couple of the areas, but maybe there’s one or two of these tips that I could be more intentional about, I could be working on, then just like start there and see what happens. Just start putting this into practice every day one or two of these tips. And I am telling you in a month or two you’ll be able to look back and go, wow, I can see how this has helped me.

I can see the improvement, I can see things that you know, in our relationship that are getting better. And of course this is my hope for you. This is my hope for myself and my own marriage and for all of us because we know that if we are working at strengthening and improving our marriages and making them vibrant and flourishing and life giving and all of that, then they don’t just affect us. They affect our children, our communities, our world really in quite powerful ways. And our marriages are called to be vocations of service. We are in these marriages because God has brought us together and he’s called us to serve our families and to serve others and to serve this world in a powerful way by being his light and his witness in this world

That is often so dark. And we need our marriages to be these vibrant lights in this world that is so in need of Christ’s presence and truth and reality shining in and through us. And so my sisters in Christ. I hope you have a great day, a great rest, rest of your week. Remember, we are not made for comfort. We are Made for Greatness. Know that God loves you and I cannot wait to be with you again soon. God bless.