00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 111, "The Checklist Relationship." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Alright, hello. I'm so glad you're with me today. I'm just having a great day. One of those days where I'm just like, "you know what? I'm just going to jump in this morning, I'm going to jump right into what I want to accomplish." I love those days where I just really take charge and don't distract myself and don't push off and don't procrastinate. It just feels really good and it really builds my self-respect and puts me in a great place. 

00:53 

So, can I just also tell you that I love this middle-age gig? I know that I say that every week, so it's kind of my tagline at the end of my podcast, but this week I'm going to say it at the beginning of my podcast: I love growing up. I love this middle-age thing. I love where we are in life. I think we have all of these things that we've started learning in our lives, all these puzzle pieces that we have collected through our lives, these bits of wisdom and understanding and knowledge, and we just hit a point where we start putting it together. And I think that it is so cool and so amazing and I love it. I love it, love it, love it. I just think this is such a brilliant stage in life, probably the best one. And the reason I think it's the best is because we have all this wisdom and knowledge and yet for me at 52, my body has not really started breaking down yet. I mean, obviously it's not my 20 or 30 year old body, but I'm still very healthy. I can go out and go kayaking or go hiking or I can do my exercise in the morning that I love to do and I can still do all of that at a very functional good level. I just love it. I hope that if you're middle-age, I hope you're loving it too because there's so much to love. And if you're not, let's chat, and let me coach you because there's so much to see and be grateful for at this stage and sometimes we just need help. That's what I do as a life coach. I just help you get to the place that you want to be, help you see what your mind is creating so that you can create what you actually want to be creating if you're not right now. 

02:42 

So today, I love this topic and I love what I've created for you. So I'm super excited to share it with you. We're going to be talking about the checklist relationship. So I want to know, first of all, raise your hands, who here loves a good checklist? You know, like one of those lists that you make with all of the things you need to get done on it and during the course of the day or the week you check things off and you get things done and you just feel really good about your accomplishments? I love that feeling. I love feeling like I'm keeping promises to myself and that I'm being productive and I'm getting my life organized. I think checklists are amazing. Even if I have basic things on them that I do on the regular, like I could say my morning prayers, my scriptures, all that kind of stuff, right? Being able to scratch something off my list reminds me that I'm moving forward. That I'm accomplishing things. That I'm creating what I want to in my life. So when it comes to things and processes, let me tell you, there is nothing like a good checklist. When it comes to relationship, there is nothing like a good checklist to destroy it. 

03:56 

So let's talk about why checklist relationships are so detrimental, okay? I'm going to go back to some of the leadership development courses that I've both taken and that I have taught. So oftentimes we will use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably, especially when we're talking in the context of businesses and that kind of stuff, but they are not the same thing at all. We manage things, we lead people, and both of those require a very different mindset. When we are managing things, it doesn't require emotional engagement. We need to put in a purchase order. We need to set up a meeting. We need to prepare the PowerPoint. That's a checklist, all checklist items, right? That is management. 

04:49 

But when I'm leading people, it requires a completely different kind of mindset. Leading requires emotional engagement. It  requires much more than a checklist. It requires listening and hearing. It requires seeking to understand and taking the needs of the other person or people into account before making decisions. Managing and leading are not the same. And when organizations hire managers to lead their people, it usually doesn't turn out well because they are both a very different skill set. Because again, we manage things and we lead people. 

05:30 

So when I was a stay-at-home mom, there was a lot of managing and there was a lot of leading that both needed to happen in my home for things to run well. I needed to manage the laundry, like making sure it got done, folded, put away, right? I needed to manage the food, the shopping, the preparation, the cleanup, all that stuff. I needed to manage the cleanliness of my home. I needed to manage schedules and appointments and practices, but I needed to lead my children. You cannot manage people. You cannot manage even your own kids, right? Instead of managing, I needed to communicate and seek to understand. I needed to listen to them. I needed to be patient and kind when everything in me wanted to throw my own tantrum and run away, right? I needed to invest time with them in reading books and teaching them skills. I needed to connect with them at an emotional level. That's parenting. Running the household and parenting are two very different things. Running the household is management. Parenting would fit more in with like a leadership concept, right? 

06:44 

When I look at my time spent at school with my eighth graders, I manage my classroom and I lead my students. I have to manage the materials, the papers, the books, and the grading. I have to have copies in on time and PowerPoints created on time and I have to understand what my end goal is with my students with regards to the standards I am teaching and that I want them to understand. These are things that are so easy to put on a checklist, but I also have to understand what my end goal is with my students in regards to how I want them to engage with me and with their learning. I have to focus on my relationship with them, because when teaching an eighth grader, I'm going to put it out there that I think eighth graders are probably the toughest age to teach, which I love that I get to teach them. I think they're super fun, but when I'm teaching an eighth grader, it does not matter one bit how well managed my classroom is. It doesn't matter how well I know my content. 

07:53 

If I do not have a relationship with them, the vast majority of them will not put forth any effort in my classroom. If they don't like me as a person and as a teacher, their brain turns off the second they walk through my classroom door. So here's what I know about my students. I cannot put them on a checklist. They are not something to be managed. They are a person to see and to hear and to understand. When I delegate my students to a checklist, I have checked out emotionally, which means that I never connect with them. So with all of this background, let's talk about our most cherished relationships in our lives. Fitting in this category would be our spouses, our children, parents, siblings, friends, in-laws, 

08:55 

For today's purpose, I want you to identify one relationship in your life that you feel is lacking a bit in connection right now. Okay, you got one in mind? Okay, let's use today's discussion to see what you are creating and how you can strengthen this relationship, okay? So I want you to think, are you managing this relationship with a checklist or are you moving into genuine connection by choosing to engage emotionally? So I know that we talk a lot about our primitive brain and our prefrontal cortex here, but that's because everything we do and everything we engage in starts with our brain and the more we understand what's going on in our brain, the more we can make the kind of adjustments that we feel we need to make, okay? Everything we feel and every end result starts in our brain. 

09:52 

So let's discuss how our relationships fit in with how our brain works, okay? Our primitive brain is an amazing tool for us. It will engage in over 60,000 thoughts a day, 57,000 of which are unconscious thoughts. And these unconscious thoughts conserve a lot of energy for us. They make our life so much better. If every one of those 60,000 thoughts was in our conscious brain, there is no way we could make it through the day. We would be exhausted by 10 a.m. if we had to think about every movement our body made and every monotonous decision that we engaged with in the course of the day. So just the waking up and getting my body out of bed would be about a hundred conscious thoughts. "Okay, open your eyes, focus your eyes, bring your right hand up to rub your eye, put it on your eye, move it to the right, the left, then the right, then the left. Remove your hand from your eye. Put your arm back down. Relax the muscles. Turn your head to the right to look at the time on the clock. Register the time." You see what I mean? Like all of that, not only would it take so much energy, it would take so much longer. 

11:15 

Our primitive brain can pop those thoughts off like nobody's business. Super fast and without conscious awareness. So the amazing thing about our primitive brain is that it does all of this with very little conscious thought, especially if nothing is out of the ordinary and throws off our routine. If it's a normal day, our brain knows exactly what to do. My routine to get ready in the morning is often done while I'm focusing on the content of a podcast or I'm getting ready. So before I know it, I'm showered, my hair and my makeup are done, I'm dressed, and I'm gathering my items to get ready to go to school, all with very little consciousness on my part. Our primitive brain loves this stuff. When it finds a continual pattern, it will go "bam, I got this," and it will delegate it into a habit, a checklist, if you will, and it will take over. It's kind of like my creepy iPhone. It notices a pattern in my behavior and it will start prompting me. For example, when I go to exercise in the morning I will use the music on my phone. So after just a few days at 5 a.m., it will send me a notification with a direct link to my iTunes. Or at 7:15 it will tell me how long it's going to take me to drive to work. Kind of creepy, right, that our phone is spying on us like that. But pretty darn cool that our brain does that. 

12:59 

So when we engage with a person in our life, if our primitive brain notices us doing the same types of behaviors consistently, what is your primitive brain going to do? Right, you got it. It will want to delegate it to a habit where we don't have to think about it anymore. It will turn it all into a mental checklist: "say good morning," check, "ask what they've got planned for the day," check, "kiss them goodbye," check, "tell them you love them," check. Okay, are all of those good things? For sure, they're great things. It's part of having a relationship, is checking in with each other. But just like getting out of bed in the morning, our brain has them all on autopilot. And we do them without a lot of, if any, conscious thought. Our brain has turned our relationship into to a checklist, and the same thing will happen at the end of the day. "Ask how their day was," check. "Give them a hello kiss," check. "Eat dinner together," check. "Zone out on a TV show together," check. "Engage in some physical intimacy," check. "Give them a kiss goodnight," check. "Tell them you love them," check, right? We can become so automated that we are missing the connection in our relationships. 

14:17 

We have started managing our relationships through checklists rather than emotionally engaging in a way that allows us to see them, to hear them, to understand them. And the purpose of our relationships isn't to have one more thing to check off of our list. It's to engage with another human being in a way that develops deeper feelings of love and connection and intimacy for both of you. It's to satisfy that basic human need we have to see and be seen, to feel a connection of our minds and our hearts in a way that brings a oneness to our relationship. So moving our relationships out of our primitive brain and into our prefrontal cortex takes time and effort and energy, all things that our primitive brain pushes against. Okay, you catching onto this? Our brain naturally wants to push us into a checklist relationship. We have to consciously keep ourselves out of it. 

15:25 

So several years ago I made this same connection with my relationship with God. I realized that when it came to my prayers and scripture reading, that my primitive brain was doing what it did best: it was habitualizing it all. I could say my prayers and after 10 minutes I would have absolutely no idea what I'd said, although I'm pretty sure I was saying something the whole time. I could read my scriptures for 20 minutes and by the time I'd finished reading the chapter, I literally had no idea what I had read and I definitely had not made any connection to how it applied in my life. This is a great example of how our primitive brain turns everything into a habit so that we don't have to think about it. I know that for me to stay aware during my prayers and scriptures, I have to really focus and pay attention. It takes effort to stay aware so that I can create a connection and feel the Spirit during these times. Moving into that space of creating a relationship with God during my scriptures and prayers really requires my emotional engagement and not a checkout when I get on my checklist. The checklist says that I've said my prayers, check. I've read my scriptures, check. The relationship says that I've connected to His Spirit. And oh, doesn't that feel better? That's the whole reason behind our wanting to read scriptures and pray in the first place. And yet our primitive brain is up there saying, "girlfriend, I got you. I got you. We've done scriptures and prayer before. I know what words to say. I know how to move my eyes across the page," and our primitive brain just takes over. Okay? So to get to this point where we create that relationship with God during that time requires a lot of great conscious effort. Okay? 

17:30 

So our relationships with the people in our lives who matter most require the same thing. Our primitive brain wants desperately to delegate it to a checklist, to make it a habit. That's where our primitive brain feels comfortable. It's what it  was created to do. And in many instances, it serves us very well. In relationships, not so much. But it will keep trying to go there and it doesn't give up easily and it really kind of never gives up. We will be struggling to stay in this pre-frontal cortex relationship our whole life, okay? But creating a connected relationship, a true, deep intimate relationship requires that we move it out of the primitive checklist and into our pre-frontal cortex, the place where we choose and respond on purpose, the place where we are emotionally engaged and paying attention and doing all the things on purpose mindfully. 

18:39 

So let's take a look at your relationship that you want to focus on. On a scale of one to ten, where are you on consciously engaging emotionally with this person? Think about this. Where are you on really being aware of how you're speaking to them? Being aware of the questions you're asking, being aware of the responses they're providing? Are you engaging at the level that aligns your hearts and your minds? Are you engaging your pre-frontal cortex in a way that puts you in charge rather than your automated habitual primitive brain in charge? Okay, so you have your number scale of one to ten, okay? So let's say you gave yourself a six at how emotionally engaged you are. So two questions for you. First question: if you gave yourself a six, why isn't it a five? Okay, if you gave yourself a three, ask yourself: why isn't it a two? Okay, identify what you are doing that is engaging at a level you want to be engaging at. And I'm assuming you want to engage at a deeper level because this is a relationship that you already identified as one that you want to work on. So what are you already doing great at? How are you really putting forth the conscious effort to engage emotionally? What are your successes? Okay, so that feels good, right? Take that bit of time to acknowledge what you're already doing that is working, that is creating the relationship you want to create Okay, realize that you're not a complete failure. None of us are destroying our relationships on purpose. We just we just allow our primitive brain to take over. Right? So acknowledge the things that you are doing that are beneficial. How are you engaging intentionally? 

20:40 

Okay, so second question. Go back to your number. How could you bump it up just one number? So if you were a six, how do you bump it up to a seven? If you were a three, how do you bump it up to a four? Think of some specific ways. Maybe you could put your phone in the other room before you start asking them about their day. Maybe you could really focus on asking follow-up questions to their responses to really understand what's going on. Could you restate their ideas after asking them several questions? How about taking time to look them in the eyes while they're speaking? These are actions, but where are the actions going to come from? They're going to come from that feeling of wanting to connect. That feeling of wanting to connect is going to come from our thoughts thinking, "I love this person and I want to connect with them." Okay, we have to start going to this place of "what is the reason I want to connect? What is the reason I want to strengthen this relationship?" 

21:44 

The goal here is to manage our thoughts so that we are intentionally engaged in our interactions with them. Not engaging because it's on our checklist, just the things that we do every day. It's not an unconscious interaction, but a full-on conscious awareness of what we are doing and knowing why we are doing it, because this person matters to us because we want to have a good relationship with them, because we want to connect in a more meaningful way with them. That takes us back to our thought and our thought creates our feelings, which then creates our actions, right? 

22:25 

So here's the thing that I want to identify with you about connection. When we say, "I don't feel connected," we need to realize that connection is a feeling that we create within ourselves. If we don't feel connected to someone, it is because of the way that we are thinking about them or not thinking about them. So let's put it in the thought model. Connection is a feeling that is created by a thought. When we want to feel more connection with someone, we have to look at our thoughts and then make adjustments accordingly. We will not feel this connection if we are "checklisting" our relationship. We have to move our thoughts from our primitive brain into our prefrontal cortex and start thinking on purpose. We have to start engaging with a true desire to connect and not just because it's something that we do. I am a firm believer that when we intentionally check into our relationships, rather than checklist our relationships, that our connection is stronger and more intimate. When we choose to engage at a conscious level, rather than the unconscious primitive brain level, we are choosing to connect. 

23:52 

Is it harder? Of course. Anytime we engage our prefrontal cortex, it's harder than when we allow our primitive brain to take over. But what in life that's worthwhile isn't harder than the other option? Anything that's really worth it in our lives requires  the effort of the prefrontal cortex. It requires conscious engagement. It requires choosing emotional engagement over the checklist. Checklists are easy. They're awesome. They have their place with things. But when it comes to people, we can't delegate it to a checklist. That checklist relationship leaves us feeling empty and lonely and it does not strengthen our relationship. 

24:46 

Okay, my friends, love growing up. I love this place where it all connects. It's all starting to make sense and I hope that you are loving this. If this podcast is helping you, guess what? You have people in your life that it would help as well. If you have not shared this podcast with those people, I want you, my friend, to repent of your evil ways. I want you to share this with people who need this so desperately. This information changes lives. It changes relationships. It changes us into becoming more the person that we want to become. Take a minute and share this. If you are a Facebooker or an Instagrammer, you can find me on there under Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching. And every week when this comes out Monday morning, it comes out on my Facebook as well and on my Instagram, and it tells you the title of it. On Facebook I can put a link to it so you can it will link you right to my website where you can listen to it there if you want. Instagram doesn't allow links so it just tells you to go to my website, which is tanyahale.com and you can pull that up there. 

26:07 

But this is some good stuff. This is important stuff. This is what moves us from just living and breathing and eating to really living life. This is what takes us from from from gray into colors. Right? This kind of stuff, this emotional engagement, this emotional health, this is what it's about. Share this. If you have not subscribed, do subscribe. Oh, and if you tell your friends about this podcast and they're like, "I don't know, I don't know how to do podcasts," have them pull out their phone and they're like, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know." Show them in two minutes or less how to get their podcast hooked up on their phone. It is so super easy. Have them pull up this podcast and have them subscribe to it and talk about this stuff with your friends. Get into a deeper level of engagement, because this is where the pieces personally really start to fit together, when you start engaging in this content with other people in your life who are at a place ready to engage in this. Obviously not everybody loves this kind of stuff. Not everybody is interested in this and not everybody is able to engage at the same level. But some of your friends are. Engage with them, right? Build your own awareness of yourself and of these concepts and go from there. This is good stuff and it is so helpful and it is changing my life for the better without a doubt. 

27:40 

Okay, that is going to do it for me. I wish you all the best this week. Take a look at your relationships. I just pray that you will move your relationship up one number level. Just change one thing to be more consciously aware, more emotionally engaged. You've got this, my friends. I know you do. You can create what you want to create in your life. No doubt. Have a freaking awesome day, an amazing week, and I will talk to you next week. Bye. 

28:15 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.