6 Steps to Change Your Marriage For the Better (Part 1)

Step #1: Learn from the “pros.”

 If you are on the varsity basketball or volleyball team, and you want to go from good to great, what do you do? As my podcast co-host Brian Goins rather hilariously put it in episode 1, you don’t put a poster of Michael Brock or Megan Hollister on your bedroom wall. Who are Michael and Megan? Well, they are the best players on your varsity team, of course!

Instead, you put up a poster of a great NBA player, and practice mimicking his stance for free throws. You watch the perfect jumps and spikes of the top women’s Olympic volleyball athletes and try the same thing over and over.

To head toward change in marriage, we have to know where we want to go! So, identify a few “Olympic greats” in your life and begin to study them. Ask them questions. What do they do differently? “Pro” couples tend to have really good road maps.

Here’s the key: Learning from the “pros” is a completely different way of approaching change, and addressing the areas of your marriage that need attention. There’s nothing wrong with the usual pattern of trying to fix things by unearthing and examining problems. But if that’s all we look at, we’re only looking at the problems! If you want to look like Jesus, you study Jesus, not the Pharisees.

One of THE most important shifts toward change for the better, is to know what works to change marriages for the better! For example, our research for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages shows that the happiest couples don’t expect things their spouse can’t deliver (episode 7 of the podcast) and contrary to conventional wisdom they do “keep score” – they just do it completely differently (episode 5).

Yes, very real hurts may have happened in your marriage. If you need to dig into those things to address them and move forward, then do so! But the only way to actually move forward is to ensure you don’t get stuck in a cycle of blame or regret. We must ask: What do we want to do differently? One couple in the research told me that their journey from troubled to terrific happened when they decided, “We need to start creating the marriage we want. At some point we’ve got to stop focusing on the past.”