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   You've built the business. You are crushing it in your career. You've scaled your impact, but are you winning at home? Welcome to the 200% Marriage Podcast. We're Meredith and Craig, and we're here to help you kill that domestic drag and turn your partner into your most elite teammate from Russian taxi mishaps to hailstorms on the summit, we're sharing the raw and real stories and tactical drills you need to move outta roommate Bill and into your 200% life. So grab your gear. It's time to build an unstoppable team. Let's dive in.

📍 If you've been paying attention, we've been reading the 200% marriage book and we are on chapter nine. We're each reading our own chapters, and Mer happened to read write, Mer happened to write chapter nine, so Mer's gonna read it. Mer, take it away. Chapter nine also happens to be the beginning of part three, the commitment to yourself. If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? RuPaul chapter nine, your mask first. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you Anne Lamot, it's Mer here, I'm gonna take the reins for part three, the commitment to yourself. Craig will chime in from time to time with his unique charm, of course, because. This has been a really powerful personal journey for me, and I wanna share it with you so it can support your own journey. Right off the bat though, let's address the elephant in the room. It might feel a little weird to open a book called The 200% Marriage and find a whole section about you. Shouldn't this book be about the team? I get where you're coming from, but no, not here and not this book. We have to start with you as an individual before we dive into your relationship with your teammate, and before we cover all the cool skills that turn you into an unstoppable team, like improving communication, building trust, deepening intimacy, resolving conflict, having fun, creating and crushing goals, and all that good stuff. And there's a really good reason for that. Actually, there are three of them. First, you can only love someone else to the degree you love yourself. Boom. That can be a tough pill to swallow. Maybe. Actually read that again, just to be sure it really landed. You can only love someone else to the degree you love yourself. When I first heard that, I didn't believe it. I thought, no way. I love lots of people more than I love myself. But the truth was my love for them was conditional on how they made me feel. Someone else can point you towards self-love, kind of like leading a horse to water, but you can't truly love them more than you love yourself. They can't love you on your behalf. They can't make you drink. Second, there's an epidemic of unworthiness in our world. Most of us don't believe we're good enough or worthy of having the relationship of our dreams. I know I didn't. Craig's not here right now, but I'll speak for him because we've talked about this many times. And he struggled with his worthiness too. Note from Craig can confirm, and when we hold that belief, one of two things tends to happen. One, we settle for less than we deserve, or two, we find ourselves in a kick ass relationship that's going really well. We sabotage it because we don't believe we're worthy of it. So we twist that relationship into a version of what we think we deserve. One that matches how we see ourselves, and I don't want either of those outcomes for you. And then finally, it's impossible to show up as your best self when your cup is empty. You need to keep your cup full so you can give freely to others. So we're gonna do what Air Canada tells us to do during takeoff. Put your own oxygen mask on first and focus on the relationship you have with yourself. We need to do that before we dive into all the fancy relationship ninja skills I mentioned earlier. Don't worry, we'll get to those ninja skills soon, I promise. But first, let's talk about who you are because that's where this first commitment truly begins. Chapter nine's a short one. Chapter nine is real short. It's the shortest one in the book. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's really there to set the stage because I think it's. It's a weird concept. I picked up a relationship book. Why the heck am I gonna talk about me for a little while? Yeah. It, it is the shortest, but it's, it's a, it's a really important one because to your point, it sets the stage for the coming chapters of the relationship with yourself, which I think is completely overlooked and undervalued in most relationship systems. Systems and talk and books and all the things. I think that it is truly undervalued and overlooked. Yeah. And I love, I love the part around, well, I hate the part around the unworthiness because I, I hate that all of us feel so unworthy and so not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, fill in the blank enough for the things that we want in our life and the part around how it impacts our relationships, how we will either settle for less than we deserve, which speaking from experience, definitely done and or taken something good and twisted into something that was not good because I didn't believe that I deserved to have the thing that was good. Mm-hmm. So either the sabotage or the settling, like either one of 'em sucks and you don't ever end up where you, you deserve to be, even though you don't think you deserve to be there. So this chapter is so important. One, to set the stage for the relationship with yourself and the work that we're gonna do in this whole part three, but two, to really drive home the point of it all starts with you. If you don't believe you're worthy of that relationship, the one that you're in being as good as it could possibly be, or if you're not in one yet, having the one you deserve. If you don't believe you deserve it, you will never have it because you'll sabotage it or you'll settle. You'll never get there. And I think you, you really have to get there. You really have to believe you are deserving of that relationship and to start with the one with yourself deserving of a good relationship with you. Because like we talk about, you gotta fill your own cup first. Like you, you cannot give to other people. You can't show up in a relationship and be the best version of you, be the teammate you wanna be in that relationship. If you're running on empty, if your battery's always dead, and that it's a really, it's really tough, I think, especially for women, but for everyone, and it's really tough to put yourself first, to put yourself over, your husband, over your kids, over your family, over your job, over all the things that are so important to you in your life, to put yourself above all those things and put yourself first. Because if you don't, one, what are you teaching everyone? What are you teaching your kids about what they deserve, that they gotta put themselves last, also, what do you have left to give them? If you have a dead battery, like, you know, you don't show up as the best version of you when you don't feel like your best self. The other side of that too, being that all the love that is given to you that is placed upon you from your teammate is never gonna land for you if you don't take care of yourself and understand your own worthiness and be confident in who you are and step into your authentic self. So this relationship with yourself, this whole section of the book is incredibly important. And again, I think why it's so. Overlooked is that we always focus on, no, it's just the communication skills and the intimacy and how do I get, you know, my partner to open up to me and all these things that, we consider as relationship skills or things that we need to talk about in relationships, but if we don't get the relationship with ourself, right? If we don't have our own self worth dialed in, if we don't know who we are in this world and be actually that person in the world. Then the love that is out there for us will never land for us because it's meant for that version of you that you've put a mask on, that's not actually you, it's for that person. And so then it never lands for you. And so then there's always this disconnect of the love that someone is trying to put on you or trying to show you, trying to give you, but it never, you never receive it because the version of you, you, you're portraying, that's the person that would be getting that love. This is something we really I didn't understand before, but I really bought into is you can only love someone else to the degree you love yourself. And like I, I really had a hard time with that at first because I thought like, no, I love a lot of people more than I love me. Which in retrospect, in hindsight, is. Devastating thing to say out loud like that, the fact that I was like, I didn't believe it and that I thought I loved a lot of people more than I loved myself, and I really, really believed. Now, I, I have a hard time justifying that that could be true. But then when I, when I finally found the path for me to see it clearly was, I don't though, because all those people I think I love more than I love myself. My love for them is conditional on how they make me feel. 'cause I don't feel that way about myself yet. So I can't just sit in that love for me and love them unconditionally. 'cause I, I don't love myself unconditionally, so I can't love them unconditionally. My love for them is conditional on how much they make me love me. if they don't make me love me, if they don't make me feel good about me, then my love for them falls short. and in the end they can't really. Like, we think they can, but it's, it's surface level. It's not it's fleeting. Mm-hmm. It's not really for you. depending on your mood that day, it might not land. Like it might not how big your cup is. Yeah. It might not land for you. Yeah. So, so this is a, it's a very, very short chapter, but those, the three reasons for it that we outlined in the chapter, they're not easy concepts to wrap your brain around, and you may not yet with one chapter, one short chapter, have bought into the fact that you can't love somebody else to the degree you love yourself. Yet you may not yet have bought into the fact that if you don't believe you're worthy of the relationship, you will sabotage it or you will settle. You may not, you may not have bought into those things yet, because this is a short chapter and we haven't proven them to you yet, but the, this is the setup. To set you up on the right foot so that as we go through this whole part three, all these chapters in the relationship with yourself, we're going to really try to, to walk you down that path so you can get here so that you won't settle, so that you won't sabotage, so that you will love yourself and therefore have more love to give other people. So it's an important chapter, but it's a real short one. So that's all we got for you this week. It's a short one. We'll see you next week.

If today's episode gave you a new lens for your relationship, don't let it stop here. The best teams never stop training on Thursdays. We drop the Unstoppable Team Newsletter on LinkedIn. It's our high performance briefing. Designed to give you one tactical drill you can run with your teammate over the weekend. So just search Meredith and Craig on LinkedIn or click the link in the show notes to subscribe. Get the briefing, kill the domestic drag, and we will see you next Tuesday.