Mapping The Health of Your Relationships | Reboot Live Part 3 | Episode #167

Aaron (00:00): Friends, welcome to Work Life Play. I'm your host, Aaron McHugh. I'm here to help you find work you love, learn to play live adventurously, become curious, and live your life with joy and purpose. Ready, Set, go.

(00:28): Welcome to another episode of Work Life Play.Broadcasting live from, I don't even know how many rooms, beds, and hotels I've slept in in the last three weeks. So I am attempting to get one more podcast out the door by week's end here, and to share with you the story about relationships. This is part three of our reboot live experience last year. And this next piece you're gonna hear is from that live weekend about mapping relationships. And I go into this idea about mapping relationships and like a dashboard, green, yellow, and reds using a color-coding system of green being good, healthy, life-giving for relationships and yellow being cautionary and things like being passive aggressive and red, just full on just sucking the life outta you. And really taking a look at our relationships in our work, in our life, in our community, and seeing where we spend our time and getting really clear on who is good for us and who brings us life and maybe who we just need to be cautious about.

(01:53): And sometimes that cautious about means. It's how we show up too to the relationship. It isn't just other people. It's sometimes the concoction, the dynamics, these learned behaviors between us. We can show up and then both instantly infuse a situation or a story. You'll hear a story from a Thanksgiving dinner with all kinds of stuff that doesn't need to be there. So this exercise is really helpful and has really shaped the way we spend our life and the way we allocate our time and where we invest ourselves and where we pull back and where we're more strategic or where we attempt to avoid certain relationships just because of the nature of what the effects are of being in a relationship. So green, yellow reds and mapping your relationship. Another episode of Work Life Play. This is good for you. Keep going. You can do this.

(02:55): I want to suggest to you that everything is connected. I believe that this weekend is a deeply spiritual weekend. And however, it might not look like, sound like, or feel like what your version of that would be. So if you go to church or you don't go to church, or you go to this brand or that brand or you believe this or you don'. What we like to do is just say, what if it all matters? What if we're all interconnected? And what if what's in us is part of the divine? That the divine's thumbprints were made on purpose, There's more going on here. And so the story that we like to lean into through the course of the weekend is what if it's all connected? What if it all matters? What if you matter? What if your happiness actually matters?

(03:56): Not so you can go buy more stuff, but so you can show up to your life and it matter to you and matter to the people that you love. So relationships end up being a really big one where it is all connected. And I think it's an easier place to feel that interconnectedness sometimes because we're in close proximity and we run into each other and we love well and we feel creepy. And there's all this stuff. So we're gonna go with a theme of green, yellow, and red. Green being healthy and really with good relationships. And we all know what those are, but I wanna show you a film clip for what I think kind of helps facilitate the idea of green healthy relationships. I wanna play you a voicemail of a yellow relationship. And so caution, I don't like how I feel about that one.

(04:54): And then I wanna show you a clip about red and what does red look like, feel like, smell like, act like. And then what we're gonna do is then we're gonna spend a little time on your relationships and we're just gonna start putting some clusters together of like, Oh, these are the green people in my life. And then the big question that we're gonna look at through the course of the weekend is, where are you spending your time? Who do you spend it with? And going back to these other things, the empowerment that we have, it turns out a lot of times the people who give us the most amount of life are the people we can often spend the least amount of time with. And we can spend so much time on the yellows of our life and the reds of our life that it doesn't leave any time and energy left over to spend time with the people who actually bring us life. And we're wondering why on our dashboard it's a solid yellow or a red. So lemme show you a couple of clips. I'll come back to this map here in a minute.

Clip from A River Runs Through It (06:30): I then saw something remarkable for the first time Paul broke free of our father's instruction into a rhythm all his own

(06:40): Okay

(07:05): Okay. They're both marvels

(07:23): I'd say the Lord has blessed us all today.

(07:36): It's Just that he's been good to me.

Aaron (07:42): So that feels green, doesn't it? Who is life-giving to you? He's green. Like just recurringly, “Oh man. I feel happy when, I feel stoked when man, that green, Oh yeah.” And it maybe that was like high school. That's like that grandparent, that's somebody you work with that you wish you could spend more time with. That's your dad. It's your mom, it's your wife, your spouse, your best friend. Who are those folks that bring you life? I would really encourage you with this question, with all three of these green, yellow, and red people that this is definitely one I'd revisit after here. Cuz I think it's really good to get clear on who's in your world, who's in your world today. I have a current list of people in my world and I have a desired list of people in my world that are in the green column.

(08:49): And here are some people I would like to be friends with or spend time with or I think I would. And then here are the people that I do. I have this gratitude tree that I drew and then listed all these people as leaves on my tree and then this other grove that I'd like to grow with some other green folks. I have a crease in the page and I turn it so that I don't stare at the same yellow in the reds at the same time as the green. Let me play you an example of what I think yellow can sound like.

Audio Clip: Holden (09:22): Hi, Leith. It's Holden. Your one and only son and I called you and you decline my phone call. And no, no, seriously, It's fine. It's fine. Don't, don't fuss about it. Don't worry. I, I'm not mad. I'm not mad. It's fine. So hope you're having a great day. Least I really, really do. All right. I'm not mad. Bye.

Aaron (09:46): I'm not mad. Really, Really? So this is Holden giving Leith shit and it was him being passive-aggressive. So yellow I think is a little bit funkier because it's like, I don't know if you feel it, but I just feel it's like a sucking sound. Now it's not blatant, but there are people that I spend time with or I'm around or that are in my life that when I walk away, I think, you know, that was kind of a B minus at best, right? It just wasn't that great. Like I love 'em and they're in my life and man, there was a green time and this is not it right now. And sometimes I'm the yellow and I've been the yellow where I've helped turn a relationship yellow cuz I was in a yellow or red place.

(10:44): But now we've got a jam, a dynamic that it's not life-giving to either of us. So I think it's really helpful in the season you're in to know and get square on who's yellow? Let me give you another dose of blessing and permission. Nobody's gonna read your list. And if your spouse or your significant other, or your best friend or their best friend is on it, well then don't show 'em. Turn your shoulder a little bit and color-code it later. But you know who those people are. So just get real. Who are those people? And then ask yourself the question, how much time am I spending with these people? Because if you're anxious and burned out and stuck and I just wanna move to Australia, and you look at your relationships and you realize that the majority of 'em are yellow and red, I would want to go to freaking Australia too.

(11:49): Or what if maybe you will move to Australia and you need to, and maybe a couple of those friendships just need a blessing of no more for a while or not now. Or maybe again, someday, or hey, when I'm better. I don't know what those are for you, but we all have 'em. So the best for last when we did this the first time through a reboot, we had this conversation about red people and the topic kind of came up, well, what do you mean when you meet Red? I thought, well, okay, I'll show you if you really wanna know. So I think it's all clear, but just to use a little bit of Hollywood, we'll get a film clip.

Clip from August: Osage County (12:33): I just don't understand why you're so adversarial.

(12:37): I'm just truth-telling. Some people are antagonized By the truth

(12:41): Everyone here loves you, dear.

(12:44): You think you can shame me, Charlie, blow it out your ass.

(12:50): Three Days ago I identified my father's corpse and now I'm supposed to sit here and listen to you viciously attack every member of this family.

(12:58): Attack my family. Have you ever been attacked in your sweet, spoiled life? Tell her about tax mefa. Tell her what an attack looks like. Don't tell me to settle down. It. I'm not an invalid. Am I to be Abbi now? Have I been passed over? This woman came to my rescue when one of my mother's, many gentlemen friends was attacking me with a claw hammer. This woman has dents in her skull from hammer blows. What do you know about attacks? What do you know about life on these planes? What do you know about hard times?

(13:41): We know you had a rotten childhood mom. Who didn't

(13:44): No, you do not know. None of you know, none of you know except this woman right here and that man we buried today. Sweet girl, Sweet Barbara. My heart breaks for every time you felt pain. I really, I wish I coulda shielded you from it. But if you think you can fathom for one solitary second, the pain that man endured in his natural love, you got another thing coming.

Aaron (14:14): Yeah. So who sucks the life outta you? Who wants to go to Thanksgiving at that house? Who's been to Thanksgiving at that house? Who brings you life? Who's a deposit for you? Every time you're with them, you're like, talk about getting my mojo back. I just spent an hour with Dave on a run. I can handle my yellow and reds on my dashboard better after I go for a run with Dave Green every time.

(14:51): What I discovered was I was spending the least amount of my time doing the things I loved that made me happy with the people that I loved who made me happy. And I was spending most of my time managing my yellows and reds. Who wants to trade me for that? Who wants to step into my life that way? Uhuh. No way. Who wants that gig? It's a crappy gig. So where we are is now hopefully like we give Scott that flyover that 50,000-foot, 30,000-foot view. Like we're looking down. No judgment. like Dave was saying, he was like, I thought I was just blowing it. I thought the reason that I couldn't figure this out was cause I was blowing it. Nope. That's not what we're here. We're just observing. It's not about blowing it, not about getting it right, it's just about the possibility that there's something else a different way.

(15:55): Some adjustments, some choices, some like empowerment. You mean like joy could be had come on. Really? Yeah. Do you mean like I could hang out with green people? You mean my finances could be in the total dumper and I could still have a green-connected spiritual life? What? Says, who? It says all of us, it's possible. It's the offer of life that's actually the offer that we actually get to mend and tend and adjust this thing and get to steer it and guide it. And maybe some of 'em are really big. So some of those reds might just need to draw a box around 'em, and say, I'm not gonna return that phone call. No, I'm not. I'm not gonna do that next Tuesday like I usually do.

(16:55): Ah, you know, I wonder if Thanksgiving, I've already done that. Oh man, you know what? Yeah, we should go to so and so's from college that invited us to road trip to Texas. Just opt out and just try something different. Something small. That doesn't mean you're never gonna go to Thanksgiving again. You might feel like it. Cuz in the narrative this is how we do Thanksgiving. You come and I do this and everybody pretends it's cool, and we all go home. So Lee and I, we've had meals like that with people we love and now we just learned to love them with a different proximity. It's still love. It's actually more love in a lot of ways. It just doesn't look like it to them. And then the green people, I think we're much better about together individually as a unit, as a family to say, Hey, yeah, what, what brings us life?

(18:02): Let's do that. And then once we have some priority to what brings us life and what we value, well then like that informed how we spend our money. Because if going to concerts with our kids is of high value to us and spending time with them and they're green and we weren't always all green with each other. There were some yellow and reds going on for us. But now that we're green, well let's spend our money in a way we would've perceived before maybe to be too much spending of money towards the things we love. Let's do that. This means then like Dave, we made some trade-offs. And so my financial security high value got notched down a little bit and said, Well, we're not gonna save that much money. We're gonna put it towards life instead. So do you see how these things start getting, it's all connected, right? And they all come back to us and that's not pressure. Oh, you gotta figure it out now, and now all the reds. No, it's awareness of the invitation of a beginning to say a new possibility of what if, What if there's another way?

(19:21): What if this just repeat, run cycle? What if the thing just needs to reboot? You've been listening to Work Life Play. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get more information about this in other episodes at aaronmchugh.com. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this adventure, for being part of braving the pioneering work of discovering sustainable work life. Play rhythms, love your work, live your life, and play a whole lot more. I'm Aaron McHugh. Keep going.

*We’ve done our best for this transcription to accurately reflect the conversation. Errors are possible. Thank you for your patience and grace if you find errors that our team missed.