Tag: how to have a good marriage

I have a question for you: What are your short-term goals when it comes to meeting your spouse’s needs?

Recap

The last few blog posts have been working on steps toward meeting each other’s needs in marriage. This is a further breakdown of step four.

The first thing you did is come up with a list of needs. You ranked each of those needs in order of importance to you, and so did your spouse. You then traded those lists with each other.

Next, you used the information in the list and those to help you understand your spouse better.

Now you’re actually into the nitty gritty of working toward projects or actions that will help you accomplish the goal of making your spouse feel better about marriage.

The reason why they will feel better about it is that their needs will be met.

I’m talking about making adjustments to your time focus.

Time is the stuff that life is made of. If you can not put in the time, you can not put in life.

In the first part of making adjustments to time focus, I said that you need to reorder things now that you’ve found out what is important to your spouse. Depending on how much of a revelation that was for you, you may find that you need to reorder your priorities.

The last post talked about looking at your long-term goals. The long-term goals came from the lifetime goals broken down into yearly goals, and the yearly goals were broken down into quarterly goals.

Go From Quarterly to Weekly to Daily Goals

Now you want to work with your short-term goals.

To come up with those short-term goals, take the quarterly goals and break them down to weekly ones. They should be the same for the week, just different projects you do on a daily basis.

So you go from quarterly to weekly to daily.

Cut Items Where Necessary

Once you have done that, you’ll more than likely have to cut something out of your already busy schedule.

Now, if you have the freedom in your schedule where you can add things, for example, if you’re retired, then you have more time flexibility. If you work for yourself and you’ve done all the hard work, and you’re past the stage where you’re working 80 hours a week on a business, you may have a more flexible schedule.

Otherwise, you may have to find something to cut out. It may be that it will be something you enjoy doing. But you are putting a higher priority on your marriage and your spouse and helping to meet your spouse’s needs.

Once you’ve looked at your schedule and found where you need to cut some things out, it’s time to add in some projects.

Schedule Ideas and Actions

At least a few times a week, ideally, you would be working on projects that will improve your spouse’s feelings about your marriage.

You could just go down his or her list and find something that has become apparent that you have not done as well as perhaps you thought you had. Maybe you hadn’t really realized how important that item was to your spouse.

So between your clients and your schedule, include time for daily projects to work on all of those things that your spouse may have a need for.

Recreation is a case where one or the other of you have engaged in that you might start looking for ways to add recreational activities and to your weekly schedule.

If you are a husband and your wife has a need for affection and romance, you might want to bite the bullet and perhaps watch a romantic movie together. That is something I do for my wife. She enjoys watching those movies, so I will watch them with her. Although, I really do like them, too. (Just don’t let the rest of the men hear me say that.) But it’s mostly about spending time together.

You could find something different that you can do in the area of showing affection. If you do not kiss your wife very often, you might make a list saying, “I learned to kiss my wife at three different times during the day.”

Those are just some examples of schedules of ideas. One man figured out that a very good thing he could do for his wife was to leave work at 5:30. He found out that they probably weren’t going to get all the work done anyway, so it was silly staying 2 hours later trying to get it done. It was better for him to go home and spend time with his wife. The work would still be there in the morning.

Those are some examples of how you can try to come up with daily goals or projects that would help you to meet your husband or wife’s most important needs.

I hope this has been helpful to you.

If you would like more tips on marriage, or to see the preceding posts in this series, just click here to be taken to all my blog posts about marriage.

I also have two books on marriage available on Amazon. The first is “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage” and the second one is “From Mountains to Molehills.”

There are more books planned, as well. The next book to come out will be about valuing your spouse and the one following that will deal with physical and spiritual intimacy. Watch for those coming soon.

Thanks for reading. I’m Randy Carney, wishing you the best in your marriage.

Making adjustments to improve your time focus

In the last several blog posts, I’ve been talking about improving your marriage. I’m continuing on that topic today.

I have been talking about the general topic of the importance of meeting each other’s needs in marriage.

Recap

I started off with the first step of making a list of needs. That started off with a premade list. I suggested that as you looked over it and saw something that you felt was left out, put it on your list. If each of you added something, you would have wound up with 12 items on your list. If only one of you added something, there would have been 11 items on your list. If both of you were satisfied with the pre-made list, you would have 10 items on your list.

Then each of you went through and ranked each item on the list in order of importance with one being the most important.

After that, you traded your lists and discussed the ranking you gave each item.

That was the first step.

The second step was how what you learned from the process of making and trading the lists helped you to have a greater understanding of each other as husbands and wives. Just knowing that you have a greater understanding of each other’s needs could benefit your marriage quite a bit.

In this step, you’re moving on to actually doing something with this list.

Last time, I talked about reordering your priorities. There, you saw that you had made a commitment to work on those projects in ways that would benefit your marriage.

Here, I’m talking about looking at the top one, two, or three needs that your spouse has. You want to work on making sure those three needs are fulfilled.

So the first part of this was reordering or ordering your priorities.

Now the second part of this is making adjustments to your time and focusing on long-term goals.

Focus on Your Lifetime Goals

What you want to do is to figure out the lifetime vision for your marriage as husband and wife and how focusing on each other’s needs can benefit your marriage.

This is sort of similar to an exercise that time management experts have come up with in the areas of business. But this will also work in your personal life. In fact, one of these exercises helps you to learn how to get control of your time and your life.

So basically, they talk about if you were to live for a longer period of time, say five or 10 years what would you most want to accomplish before you were to pass away? Write down some ideas.

Then you would do a shorter period of time; maybe 1-3 years. What would you want to accomplish in that time period?

What if you were told you only had six months to live? What would you want to accomplish?

Okay, so now you should have come up with a list of several ideas. Next, you’re supposed to pick out the top three and then narrow it down to one major one.

When you have looked at the list of needs that your spouse has identified, what are your lifetime goals when it comes to helping your spouse feel fulfilled in your marriage together?

You want to come up with long-term lifetime goals.

Break Those Down to Yearly Goals

The next step is to break it down to a yearly goal.

What would you hope to accomplish this year in improving your ability, actions, and time spent on helping your husband or wife feel fulfilled by meeting their basic needs?

Come up with a plan for two or three goals for the year that will entail meeting your spouse’s needs.

Break Yearly Goals Into Quarterly Goals

Then break it down further into quarterly goals.

So what you’ll have is lifetime, yearly, and quarterly goals. These are long-term goals for this aspect of improving your marriage.

On the quarterly, you may have identified the top three yearly goals and you may just want to focus on one of those during the quarter.

As you think about that yearly goal, it’s a good idea to have maybe four steps to make that goal come about. Then you would want to focus on one of those steps each quarter.

But let’s say you only have two steps. In that case, you would have two quarters focusing primarily on one of those.

I know this is a little bit vague, but the idea is that you have a lifetime goal and a yearly goal, and you want to break it down to a quarterly goal.

I suggest that you have one to three goals to focus on for your marriage for this quarter.

Basically, what you’re trying to accomplish is making adjustments in your marriage to improve your focus on meeting your spouse’s needs.

If you just get the list, and you just get the understanding but don’t pursue improvement, then you don’t have the greatest benefit that you could have if each of you were to focus on meeting your spouse’s needs in a greater way.

In order to do that, you have to deal with time.

Benjamin Franklin said that time is what life is made of. Someone else said what you cannot put into time you cannot put into your life. If your life is already full, and your time is already claimed, which probably is in a lot of areas, in order to improve your marriage, you can not change.

You’re going to have to put in some time, so you’re going to have to adjust your time to focus on your goals for your marriage. That may mean that you would have to cut something out.

Again it is a matter of priorities.

What is most important to you? How important is your marriage? In order to work on improving your marriage, you’re going to have to cut something out. You have to figure out where and when you are going to do certain projects or actions.

I hope this has been helpful to you as you are focusing on your marriage. If you already have a great marriage, may it be an even greater delight for you. If you’ve had some challenges in your marriage. I pray that this aspect of your marriage will revolutionize your life.

If you’re interested in the rest of this series (so far) or other posts about marriage click here. The link will take you to my blog where you will find the other posts.

There are also three books you might be interested in. Two of them have to do with marriage. The first one is “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage” and the second one is “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage.”

The other book you might be interested in is “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death.”

I’m Randy Carney, wishing you the best in your marriage

Hello, everyone. Welcome. Again today I’m talking about marriage. In particular, today’s post is about reordering your priorities.

I have been talking about the general topic of the importance of meeting each other’s needs in marriage.

Now we’ve come to the fourth step of that process, so I’m talking about satisfying adjustments by reordering your priorities.

What does that mean?

Well, you’ve come to the point where you realize that you needed to make some changes and hopefully you and your spouse have taken those steps as described in previous posts.

So now I’m going to tell you how to get more satisfaction and feel like you’re making progress in your marriage. The way to do that is by making adjustments to balance your time and focus and reordering your priorities.

You Discovered the Need for Change

In order to do that, we need to reorder our priorities. You discovered the need for change when you went through the process of listing and ranking your 10 or 11 (depending on if you added a category to the premade list) by ranking your list of felt needs according to the order of importance to you and then your spouse did the same. You most likely discovered something when you discussed those lists.

That’s when you discovered the need for change.
You reviewed your lists.
You discussed your lists.

Those interactions helped you to understand where your spouse was coming from. It gave you recognition of the need for change if you had not previously been doing as good a job as you needed to in meeting your spouse’s needs.

You Have to Commit to Change

But more than just recognizing the need for change, you also have to commit to change.

There’s a scripture verse that talks about a man who looked in the mirror and then walked away, forgetting what he looked like. (James 1:23) When he was looking in the mirror, he saw what he looked like, but after he walked away, he forgot. But the mirror actually accurately reflected what he looked like.

A more general application of that is not focusing upon physical appearance, but focusing on recognizing what manner of person you are when it comes to meeting each other’s needs in marriage.

You have discovered where you may have fallen short in certain areas and now you’re going to commit to making a change in those areas.

So you have to commit to change. Otherwise, things will just go on like they have always gone on. Your commitment will make a difference in that area.

Clarify By Writing Your Priorities and Plans

Then you can clarify things in your mind by writing down your priorities and plans. Statistics from business coaches tell us that people in business are so much more likely to accomplish their goals when they write them down.

Also when you go through the process of writing down your list of priorities, your mind is at work. Since you will be inserting a new priority, you’re going to have to figure out where it goes now.

Many Christians have their general priorities set up this way and I think it is in the correct order: Our first priority is our relationship with God. close behind that is our relationship with our spouse. Thirdly would be the relationship with our children and then finally, it would come into our own lives and our business dealings and our entrepreneurial pursuits.

Reordering when Necessary

You may have already had that order of priorities. More than likely, however, if you are working on daily goals, you’ll see the need for reordering your list of priorities. Your family may even be excluded from your current list. So here’s your opportunity to change by making an adjustment to focus on doing a better job of meeting the needs of your husband or wife. That will involve reordering your priorities.

I hope this has been helpful to you. If you’d like more tips like this just click here. It will take you to the main page containing all the marriage blogs, including the ones in this series.

Also, I have two books on marriage that are currently available on Amazon. The first is called “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage” and the second is “From Mountains to Molehills.” I encourage you to check those out.

There are two more in the works and these recent posts on marriage are going t make up another one.

On another note, aside from the books on marriage, there’s also one on writing a book if you are interested in that. It’s called “How to Write a Book in 28 Days or Less Without Stressing Yourself to Death.“

I hope that the Lord blesses you as you decide to work on reordering your priorities. Until next time, I’m Randy Carney wishing you the best in your marriage.

Why taking turns focusing on each other’s needs makes sense.

Hello everyone. Today I’m talking about marriage again. Particularly, I’m talking about seven steps that will help you meet each other’s needs in your marriage.

The first step involved making a list and ranking the list of each other’s felt needs.

The second step was using that information to gain a better understanding of each other.

This third step involves you deciding to take turns focusing on meeting each other’s needs and why it makes sense to do that.

You Will Both Be Invested

Well, first of all, you both will be invested in the project. You’ll be sharing the load so it won’t just be one of you.

Perhaps in the past one of you has invested more in your marriage than the other person. But now at this point, you have a joint project. Although you’re not doing the same thing because your needs are different.

Well, they’re probably different. If your number one need is the same thing and you both are focused upon that for each other, then that’s a great thing. But more than likely you had some revelations, maybe even some surprises when when you went through your list-building process.

This is going to be a joint project and you will both be invested in it. It won’t be just one of you working hard at meeting the other person’s needs. It will be fair.

Maybe in the past to have felt like some things were not there, but this is an immediate chance for you to begin a new to start meeting each other’s needs.

You’ll Be Making Up for Past Missed Opportunities

Secondly, you will begin making up for past missed opportunities. Maybe in the past, you have neglected your spouse’s needs, or maybe your spouse has neglected your needs.

This is a new day!

Taking turns focusing on each other’s needs gives you a chance to make up for the past and stop pretending.

Maybe in the past, it was not intentional that you weren’t meeting one or the other’s needs and it was just that you really didn’t know and you had not communicated.

But now that you know, you have new opportunities to make up for past missed opportunities. It is intentional and it’s time for a new day in your marriage.

You Will Start Seeing Results Quickly

Once you start doing this, you will see results very quickly because you’re armed with new information.

You’re both invested in the project.

You both know what the other ones trying to accomplish.

You can communicate with each other.

If they do a good job, you can thank them so much for it.

If your mate wants to know what he or she could do to help you, then you also have an opportunity to communicate with each other.

You will start seeing results very quickly because you both are involved in this new project and the importance of that will motivate you.

This will help you to be ready because you see immediate changes.

You might be thinking, “Oh, this will be a long drawn-out process. It will take forever for us to get back on track and our marriage.”

There might be some areas where you still need to get on track and other areas where this will move faster because you are both invested. You will start seeing some change and some improvement very quickly, and when you see that quick change and improvement, it will motivate you to try some of the other things.

Some of the other things may not be as easy as some of the others. Some things may take longer. Some of the things might be that one or the other of you has broken trust in your marriage and might take longer for that trust to rebuild.

On the other hand, if you’re both taking this very seriously, and you start feeling some of the needs that formerly were not met being met within your life, you will enjoy that change. You will be motivated, helpful, and ready to start the next phase and some of the next steps toward meeting each other’s needs.

Today’s Wrap-Up

I hope this has been helpful to you. If you would like more tips like these just click here to be taken to other posts about marriage.

I also have two books on marriage currently available on Amazon. They’re the first two in a series called “The Loving Way to A Successful Marriage” with LOVING being an acronym.

The first one is “21 Ways the Principle of Leaving Will Benefit Your Marriage.” The L in loving stands for leaving. Now it’s not talking about leaving in the sense of divorce, although that could be the last resort that might have to happen in certain instances, this is talking about leaving your past and your baggage behind. In this case, leaving some of the new habits that you developed after you got married and perhaps need to change.

The second book is “From Mountains to Molehills: Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in Marriage.” So, the “O” in LOVING would be overcoming.

There are two more books that are in the development stage. One is called “Valuing Your Spouse-The Most Important Attitude You Can Have in Your Marriage”, which will take care of the “V”.

The next one I am working on is “Intimacy”, which will be the”I” in LOVING. I will have a book on that coming out.

Then these blog posts are the basis for the next book in the series, which will be about meeting needs.

But the first two books are out and available on Amazon right now, and I would encourage you to go check them out.

Have a wonderful day. Until next time, this is Randy Carney reminding you that you can have a happy and successful marriage!