Does this sound like you?
- You’re busy and stressed about a last minute, fire-drill that your boss just threw at you to complete in two hours — but your significant other comes in and starts blowing up at you about . . . how suede cannot ever get thrown into the laundry.
- The stress of juggling your high pressure job is already ridiculous enough, so piling on yet another issue with your SO is just too much. You find yourself brushing everything under the rug just to get by and then unloading onto your friends about the smallest things that you know really don’t matter.
- Or perhaps, you and your SO made some goals together — you wanted to run a marathon, meal prep, kill it at work, take three consecutive days off, and read more books — but last time you checked, your combined step count is in the 100s; you live off of delivery; your colleague got the stretch matter; you’re somehow always busy with little results; and yet you’ve also run out of every Netflix show to binge on.
Woof. Yeah, as very busy, high achievers, relationships are hard. But one thing that could help you is scheduling “relationship retros” to take a step back and focus on how to improve the relationship and support each other and your long-term goals.
Wait, What’s a Relationship Retro?
Let’s back up and talk about what a “retro” even is. Retros are common in the software development world – just say “retro” to a software developer, and they oddly know what it is: It’s where a team comes together on a review cadence (or a “sprint”) and holds a retrospective (or “retro”) about what is working, what isn’t, and next steps on how to do better. Normally, they occur every other week or so, but can vary.
We decided to snag this idea and apply it to the project we care most about in our day-to-day busy lives: our relationship. Every two weeks, we sit down and talk about how we are doing. . . and see how we can be better going forward.
We have seen so much success with using our retro system that we wanted to share it with you. It has helped us support each other in tackling our long terms goals and reflect on our well-being, both individually and as a couple. It has also helped us manage our time and energy, as it gives us a reliable, systematized process to make sure we both feel valued and heard.
Here’s a sample template to help you get started:
Why Does It Work?
It works because the retro is set on a review cadence. For example, we retro every other Friday at 7:00 a.m. for about 60-90 minutes. In case you’re wondering, a review cadence does the following:
- It creates a sense of urgency, regardless of your time preference (whether you tend to procrastinate, or if you prefer to work ahead).
- It gives you the opportunity to recognize if your goals and intentions are mis-matched, mis-aligned, or not fleshed out enough.
- It allows you to think through the critical path (i.e. next actions(s) for your goals).
- It allows you to make bite-sized steps toward your goal.
- It saves energy and time because it allows you to get the stuff out of the way at once instead of at inopportune moments throughout the week – instead of going down a vortex of mis-aligned expectations or hurt feelings, you’re able to take a beat and go over things at a designated time: “could we save talking about this for our retro?”
- It’s also a time where you know you can address issues that you have or be more intentional about whether you’re really living the life you actually want together.
And you can really nerd out in the process — we even have metrics and such to gauge progress (more on this later), but you don’t need any of that to get started.
How Do I Talk My Partner into Trying This?
If you don’t know what to say when asking your partner, just try copying / pasting this to them:
Hey :heart:, Just heard about a system called Relationship Retros. Pretty much we just sit down twice a month and talk about us. It's a little nerdy, but I think we should try it! This is what the template looks like: https://liuholzmann.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Basic-Retro-Plan.pdf Don't worry, we will add our own spin on it.
Have a success story with this? We would love to hear about it! Drop us a line at: hello@liuholzmann.com
A+J 🌱
