Some time ago, I talked about a couple of questions that Joàn and I discussed. We ended up having a good time talking about our past week and sharing things that were important to us. We also talked about continuing these kind of questions, but we don’t want to turn our marriage into some kind of coaching formula. I asked a good friend to think about doing this together. Long story short: he was very enthusiastic and we scheduled our first call right away.

1. Find someone
Obviously, the first step is to find someone you are comfortable with. Personally, I’d want someone with the same gender, because you’ll share a ton of stuff and the last thing you want is to have someone get between you and your loved one. You should find someone who’s a good listener, can motivate you with your goals (and ask sharp questions about it) and is in general an inspiring person. These people are rare. Just talking with someone about your goals without that person motivating you every single day can be of enormous help already.

2. Schedule your first talk
This would be about the time, the place, the questions and expectations for talking together. Make sure that you both are prepared: how much time are you willing to invest? What kind of things would you expect from your meetings? Would it be necessary to meet in person, or could you use technologies like Skype?

We talked about this and came up with the following:

• A 30 minute Skype call, each thursday from 7:30 till 8:00 AM.
• We both have 15 minutes to talk, the other person listens
• We don’t take time to chat about how we are doing aside from the questions we answer, because both our time is valuable and we want to use it as efficiently as possible
• We start prepared, so we have all questions answered before our call
• Our progress and goals to work on are stored in a shared document on Google Drive

Basic stuff, but it works really well for us. We prepare and discuss the following questions:

1. Which 3 things went really well last week?
2. Which things didn’t went well? What tasks did you not finish?
3. How are you going to make sure that things that didn’t went well won’t go wrong again next week?
4. Any brilliant insights to share?
5. Which goals are you going to tackle this week?
6. How are you investing in yourself this week? Which (new) techniques are you going to use?

3. Go!
Now, enjoy the conversations you are going to have. Make sure to reflect on your talks and refine questions or guidelines you both need to get the most out of your time together.