When we started to truly implement accountability into our business, not only me holding our team accountable, but them holding me accountable, some things started to change, some incredible things started to happen. Because I found out that for me, for JD, accountability is my strength. Accountability allows me to accomplish anything I want. But this second core value that we have is what I want to talk about today, and that's accountability. Write this down for me. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. I don't know if you all know. I think I saw it correctly today. It's National Daughters' Day. Did anybody know this? Anybody familiar with this? It might have been yesterday, but I have three daughters, and so when I just saw this picture pop up here, I'm like, oh my gosh. Three daughters. That's Molly, is the youngest, Sally is in the middle, and Lainey is the oldest, and that's my wife, Lindsey. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. Accountability has three forms. The first form of accountability is writing it down. You want to accomplish something, write it down. You want to hold yourself accountable, write it down. Make a list. Prioritize it. Execute it. While you're working on that list, make another list. Call that your parking lot. Reprioritize it. Accountability allows you to do anything that you want to do. Accountability makes anything possible. The second form of accountability is sharing what you want to accomplish with other people. Sharing. Tell somebody about it. And the third form of accountability is to ask that person that you shared what you want to accomplish. Ask them to follow up with you. Ask them to hold you accountable. This has got to be a trusted advisor. This has got to be a trusted person. Somebody who loves you. Somebody who cares about you. Somebody who cares about what your goals, what your dreams are, what you want to accomplish. I was coming home from work on a Saturday, normal Saturday to me. It was during tax season. And as I pulled into our neighborhood, we're the second driveway on the right. So as you come around, I can't really see my house, but as you come around the curve, I could see that there are cars at my house. When I pulled in, I recognized some of the cars as my in-laws. They're normally there. They come over all the time. I've known them since I was 15 because I started dating their daughter September 26, 1999. So it's not odd to see them there. And I walked in. I'm on the phone talking with one of my assistants. And they're sitting there on the couch. And not only are they sitting on the couch, my pastors are on the couch. And my wife is there. And I'm on the phone and say, hey, I got to get back with you. Hang up the phone. What's this? What's going on? My wife's like, Jonathan, we need you to sit down. She starts reading me this letter that talks about everything I've been doing the last 15 years. She tells me about how she thinks that I'm drinking too much. She tells me that she doesn't agree with me doing drugs. She tells me that there's going to be a new way of life around here. There's going to be a new plan. I get up out of the chair. I'm like, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. I go back into my bedroom. I go in the bedroom. There's four suitcases packed up, four suitcases. I walk into my closet. We're always dropped my keys. I check where I always keep my stuff and it's still in there. I walk back in. I'm like, well, this just isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. This is not happening. She continues to read through the letter and we continue to have a conversation. We negotiate for five hours.  It is not happening.  You're not going to put these rules on me after we talked for a long period of time. We finally got to the point where it was okay for me to stay home. But I had to do two things. I had to start going to AA and I had to start going to marriage counseling.  I had a decision to make. It was up to me because others had already made a decision for me. And until I made that decision myself, nothing was going to change because for two years I had been told by my wife, asked by my wife, pleaded, please go get help. How in the world can an accountant not believe an accountability? How is that possible? How can you sit there and think, this is nothing that I need help with. I'm in control. I've got this. I don't have a problem. I started going to marriage counseling every week. Every week. It sucked. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to talk about everything that had happened. I did not want to be the enemy. I didn't want to be held accountable for my actions.  I had to unwrap so many layers. I started going to AA. I never even thought about even remotely getting close to that kind of a place. I did not want to listen to everybody else's problems. I did not want to sit there and admit the fact that I'm an alcoholic. But what is amazing is when you start to give up control of everything in your life, of those things that have control in your life, the thing that I learned when I started sharing with others about how I thought about things, what made sense to me, why alcohol had this kind of a control over me. I started to learn, holy crap, there's other people that think just like this. Unbelievable. And it started to help. It started to allow me to think clearer. It started to allow me to be there for my girls again. It allowed me to be there for my wife again. After I started going, I went to this conference called 10X. Anybody been to 10X? 10Xers? I went to this conference and I saw Tim's story speak. I saw Coach Michael Bird speak. I saw Hank Norman speak. And holy cow, I was like, this is the way to do business. When I was there, I woke up in the middle of the night. It's two o'clock in the morning. I'm in Vegas. I'm an alcoholic and an addict. How in the world am I going to go to Vegas? But luckily I'd started going to AA and I'd had that intervention. I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought about this new way of doing business. It just kind of hit me. It just kind of came across like it was like this Jerry McGuire moment where it's like this new idea of doing business, fixed price accounting packages, this new way of being able to grow and scale your business. I was going to get in front of so many people on so many stages. I was going to start being in videos. I was going to start shooting YouTube videos for goodness sakes. I was going to make accounting sexy, just like insurance, right? And so I went to this conference when I came back. I had a company at that point in time that was very successful, profitable. We started to change the way we did business. I had a partner at the time and he didn't go to 10X with me. Have you ever been around if you went to 10X?   Why are you doing this?  Don't do it. It's typically the closest people to you. What was amazing though is that Lindsay was completely supportive of this. And so when I came back and started being on videos, I was flying on jets, I was going to all kinds of different conferences, meeting so many awesome people, and it was going really well. Our business was growing like wildfire. It was awesome. As it continued to grow, my partner and I, we went to this 10X 360 event because we were starting to grow apart. We thought, man, we need to go to something together, get on the same page. So when we went to that event and we left, we thought we were on the same page. In two or three weeks, it started to kind of spread apart again. We weren't thinking the same way. We didn't believe in the same things. And so when I was on a trip to Disney World, I get an email, and it's not really an email that I really appreciated, to be honest with you. It was an email that said, this is your problem. You're going to handle this. I said, fine, we're done. I started getting messages from clients that weren't getting customer service. They weren't getting calls back. Emails weren't being answered. Tax returns were really done right. I started to understand that this transition that I had made, where I gave my partner all of the power, all of the control, all of the decision making, because I was making videos. I was flying on jets, meeting all these people, bringing in all this business. But I found out that everything that was happening on the back end wasn't what I thought it was. When we split, holy cow, I had two cultures growing inside of my business. Some people that wanted to work, and some people that didn't want to work. I had two different types of clients. Those that were traditional clients, and those that had kind of come on board during this time while there's on videos, and JD's going to help me do this, and he's going to help me do that, and he's going to help me do everything in my business, and all of a sudden I'm going to become a millionaire because I'm working with him. Somehow that was the message that got out. So the day that my partner left, one person quit. Another person quit. My whole management team quit. I started losing clients over and over and over again each week on a Sunday in particular. People just started to quit. Before I made this decision, because I become more awake in my mind, because I wasn't drinking anymore, I felt like that there was something missing in my life. There was something missing. And what I realized that was missing was my relationship with Jesus. So I decided that I needed to start reading the Bible. And when I was reading the Bible, I had never actually gone through it all in one year. I'd never done that before. So I decided to get an accountability partner. When I got this accountability partner, we sent each other a check message every single time that we read the Bible that day. I started to get fulfilled, but while that was happening, I had these people leaving at the same time. God, why in the world is this happening? Why is this still an issue? I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing. I'm going to AA. I've gone to marriage counseling. I'm reading the Bible now. I'm doing all of these things correct, I thought. But as I continue to read in it and as people continue to leave the business, as clients continue to leave the business, I started to have this realization, holy crap. I'm the only common denominator here. There's got to be something that's going to change. There's got to be some change here, and it's going to take me to do it. I've got to make the decision again. How am I going to rebuild this business? I had mountains of debt piling up. We went from 1,250 clients to 256. I was able to find an angel investor. They started working with me one-on-one. They started working with me in an accountable way. I laid out a budget. Imagine that. I laid out a budget. I started following that budget. That got the finances in order. But as people continue to leave employees, team members, relationships, vendors, as they continue to kind of see what was happening, I started to feel abandoned. And I started to get angry about that. But I knew that what I wanted to do in the beginning, what I wanted to do when I started following this new path in my business, what I wanted to accomplish, I did not want to give up on that. But I had to do it a different way. I wasn't going to do it just by myself. I couldn't just be everything to everybody. I realized that I needed to build some system, some way for all of my other employees to understand exactly how we do business. I went to that boot camp with Matt Monero and Judge Graham. I had my eyes open to the fact that if, man, if you establish these core values in your business, everything runs smoother. When you start to live by those core values, when we started to truly implement accountability into our business, not only me holding our team accountable, them holding me accountable, some things started to change. Some incredible things started to happen. We hired one person. We started this hiring strategy. We hired another person. We're hiring based off these core values. As people that are new to this industry when you're in the accounting world, it is hard to integrate into the way the things are in the real world. When you go to college and you're studying accounting, they teach you how to study to pass the CPA exam. I had to develop this system that could be replicated. I started meeting with our new team members on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We started going through this book called Traction. If you haven't read it, read it and run your business off of that book. It's your playbook. We started to implement accountability into our everyday. We started to write down our goals. I started to write down my goals not only in the morning but in the evening. Why did I do that? I was following Grant Cardone. He said the number one thing that he has done that has allowed him to reach the levels that he has reached is by writing down his goals twice a day. I was like, you know what? I'm going to try this. I'm going to do it. I'm going to post on Instagram every single time I do it because I'm going to use Instagram as an accountability tool. I'm going to start sharing with other people that this is what I'm doing because I found out that for me, for JD, accountability is my strength. Accountability allows me to accomplish anything I want. Accountability allows me to help my team accomplish anything they want. As we started writing down our goals, we also started writing down what we are grateful for every day. We call it our daily ledger. The daily ledger defines what your goals are, what you're grateful for, what your three targets are each day, and what would make today great. This is an incredible tool that we have used that is a requirement in our business. It is a requirement of our team. This has changed our whole organization. We've gone from 256 clients now up to 1,064 clients as of this week. I really appreciate that. It is amazing the difference in the team and how we work together now, how we integrate together, and we're starting to magically find people that think, act, behave just like I do. Just like Matt and Judge were talking about, that you start to identify, you start to find the right people. It is amazing how it works. As you are building your teams, I encourage you to utilize these core values to start to implement those because it will have an impact on your business. As we started adding more and more people to the team, we went from 42 people down to 10, I think we're at 97 now. In the midst of all of this, I partnered with Paul Croft. When I started writing down my goals every day in November of 2019, some amazing things started to happen, and it wasn't only because of that. As I was reading the Bible each day, I started to recognize the fact, and after studying and AA, relying on my higher power, I started to understand that it wasn't just me that was going to make this happen. It wasn't just me that was going to be able to rebuild this business. It wasn't just me that it was relying on. I could rely on God. This whole spiritual aspect started to infuse back into my life, and you can see the picture of my family there. It allowed me to be able to reconnect with them in a way that I had never connected with them before, and it became so clear to me that this constant chase of the dollar, this constant chase of success, was something that I needed to check myself on. I want to be successful, but I want to pursue significance. I am not a perfect person. I have done a lot of terrible things, but I truly believe in progress over perfection. In our industry, we constantly talk about, and I use this quite a bit, that we are practitioners not perfectionists. What's interesting to me is that as I have studied accounting and as I have been involved in taxes and as I deal with clients from day to day and help them build their businesses and help them utilize the tax code, I have to remind myself too that I am a practitioner. I am not perfect, but I can believe in someone who is, and I can have my life follow someone who is. As I have continued to build this team and we have worked together, I realize that there has to be some consistency among all of the services that we add, all the services that we provide. I have to have some way to hold them accountable. We started to implement what we call scorecards, it's interaction, read it. These scorecards to allow us to have metrics. We are able to run our business consistently now and an inconsistent client base starts to become consistent when you bring consistency to your employees. It's amazing how this works. What has happened is we have created this system, these four pillars of wealth creation in which we believe will build wealth. This is not just from our point of view. This is from seeing every single client that we have over the last eight years, 15 years for me working at other accounting firms. This system is something that basically how we interact with our clients, how we interact together, how I teach our team now to serve you better is in each one of these different areas. We talk about these areas all the time, every day, every week, weekly training. Weekly training for our clients, we call it tax talks. We try to over communicate. What is really interesting is since we have simplified this in our business, that's allowed us to now have an opportunity to scale, have an opportunity to help more people. Basically from all these business owners that we've studied over all these years, we know that if you apply these four pillars, you will create wealth. Each one of these pillars requires you to be a part of it. See, I've come across a lot of clients that basically say, hey, why don't you fix this problem? You need to do this. You need to do that. I haven't heard from you. You're the business owner. We serve you. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? There is no way I would overcome alcoholism if I didn't put my butt in the chair and go to AA. It wasn't happening. So our first pillar is generating over $10,000 a month. Creating wealth requires you to earn over $10,000 a month. The second pillar is identifying tax savings. Tax planning is essential to your business. I showed one client here recently, man, they took a lot of great expenses. I was on the phone with them. They were doing our tax planning package. Man, they took everything. They had done conservation easements. They had done this. They had done that. They had a 401k plan. They were using every single play in the book, right? I was like, man, y'all have done really well. But I started out. I kept asking questions. I realized they had purchased a building. Ah, cost segregation study. Tax savings saved them $330,000, $330,000. Now they can use this next one, protect your income, life insurance. They can start to protect their income with their tax savings every single year. This is how you build wealth, everybody, practically. And finally, saving to invest. How much should you save before you invest? It depends. The best answer in the book for an accountant. It depends. It depends on what your goals are. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Let's lay out a plan. But it's going to involve these four. So I want to ask you, if you want to learn more about these, the way that you start working with us is joining our free private Facebook group. If you text 844 JD Frost, text 8Nation to that number, you'll get an invite. I would love for you to invite every Tuesday at about 7 to 8 p.m. It kind of varies. I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I put a post in there every Tuesday about anything relative to taxes, business, growth, personal growth, struggles with alcoholism, struggles in business. It's hard. This is difficult. This is not meant for everybody. And it takes time. It takes real time. And what I like to refer to is patience and persistence. Patience and persistence required when you were trying to grow wealth. When you were trying to do something big. I thought that it was going to happen overnight. I left 10X and I thought, this is going to happen this year. Here we go. I cannot wait. And I have been on a journey. And for me, the only way that I am able to live out patience and persistence is my relationship with Jesus Christ. And so in closing, I would just like to pray for this room. God, thank you so much for 8% Nation. I really appreciate everything that you have provided for everybody in this room, Lord. I pray that you would be with each one of these business owners, each one of these individuals. Please be with them through the hard times. Please be with their families during these hard times. Please continue to bless us and bless each other with our relationships that we have together, Lord. And let us know that through accountability to you, through accountability with each other, through accountability to ourselves, that we can accomplish anything in your name. Amen. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got another one you're going to love. It's right there. Click on it. See you in there. Thank Cody and Lauren for putting this on.  Amazing. Amazing event. Okay? Amazing. Really, you guys are awesome, like when he called and said, hey, would you do this deal? The fact that they're willing to.


A group that is approaching their 100th anniversary of being formed after the passing of the 19th amendment met this week in Brainerd. The League of Women Voters meeting focused on election security and how it affects the voting process. The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan group that has the mission of envisioning a democracy where every person has the desire, the right, and the knowledge as well as the confidence to participate. The group focuses on vital democratic issues of concern to group members and to the public. We're a non-partisan league. We're dedicated to educating voters on different topics. We put together all of the candidate forums in conjunction with others. The event focused on our election system and the issue of election security that many are concerned about today. An official from Crowan County spoke about voter turnout over the years in Crowan County and issues that affect voters in our community. One of the biggest threats to our elections environment is misinformation and one of the things that I've always felt is it's important to get out and make sure that people know that there is security around our elections process and the only way that they can know that is if we provide that information to them. So by having that opportunity to meet with groups like the League of Women Voters we can get the right information out to the public. The League of Women Voters will be holding a congressional election forum as well as a forum for the race for Crowan County Sheriff in the coming months.


In this presentation we have tried sincerely and respectfully to explain the Jewish point of view concerning Jews who have embraced or are thinking of embracing Christianity. In the final analysis it is you who must make the decision. In the course of our discussions we have concentrated on the major theological issues. Good Jesus have been the Messiah. What is the Jewish conception of God? Does the Hebrew Bible demonstrate the truth of Christianity? How does God forgive sins? Is devotion to Jewish Christianity consistent with the commitment to the survival of the Jewish people? We have tried to show that the arguments for your conversion are not persuasive on an intellectual level. In the decision of this magnitude, however, there are emotional factors involved as well and there is nothing wrong with that. You may have felt them in the form of a sense of fellowship and genuine religious concern on the part of your Christian friends. But you have also felt the instinctive opposition of many Jews that are prospect of your conversion. And it is worth considering the reasons for that opposition.  Often they had to give their very lives when misguided Christians forced the choice of baptism or death on them.  Had they chosen baptism you would not have been born a Jew. Their readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice creates a special obligation for their descendants not to render that sacrifice meaningless. Before abandoning Judaism of your ancestors you have to make an all out effort to study it, to know it, to live it. In the early part of this century a Jewish philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig was on the verge of converting to Christianity. He had been brought up in a fairly assimilated Jewish home in which Judaism played a very small part, but feeling he should convert as a Jew and not as a pagan he decided to attend the Yom Kippur service in a small traditional synagogue in Berlin. The spirit and liturgy of the day transformed his life. He came to know that God wanted Jews to remain Jews, to be faithful to the covenant God made with the patriarchs. Franz Rosenzweig became one of the great Jewish thinkers of our time. The people of Israel is chosen by God to be a quote a nation of priests and holy people. Exodus chapter 19 verse 6 by remaining loyal to your people you can help it live up to its divine calling by considering the devotion of its martyrs through the ages and by remembering the fate of the six million who were murdered in our own time because they were Jews you can come to live a life worthy of their sacrifice you're facing a critically important decision your choice will determine not only your own religious destiny but the identity of your descendants as well study intensively consider carefully and with the help of God choose wisely


All right, so today's toolbox is really understanding four dynamics in your close interpersonal relationships and how they can lead to conflict, how they can lead to struggles in communication, breakups, divorces, and even worse. So I know for a lot of our X Factor Accelerator members, they joined the program because they feel that they're struggling in their relationships. Sometimes it has to do with their own behaviors and actions and the version of themselves that they're bringing into those relationships and their communication. And sometimes it has to do with the way people in relationships are treating them. So we thought it'd be fun to do a deep dive into these four relationship dynamics or as Dr. John Gottman calls them, the four horsemen, because the more you understand them and yourself, the easier it's gonna be for you to create impactful relationships in your life.  So if you're listening and you're saying, well, AJ, I'm single, I'm not really worried about marriage right now, still stay tuned and listen in because these dynamics do play out in other areas of your life, even though Dr. John Gottman's research was primarily focused on romantic relationships. So before we jump into these dynamics, I think we've talked about Dr. John Gottman a lot on the show. We find a lot of his principles woven into our X Factor Accelerator program. So Michael, who is Dr. John Gottman? Tell us a little backstory of him and the work that he does. Oh, yeah, I could geek out about Dr. Gottman for hours, but I'll give you the cliff notes. So Dr. John Gottman is a psychologist who specialized in couples research. And he did over 40 years of research with over 3,000 couples. And he got famous for his ability to predict with 90% accuracy if a couple would stay together. And he could do that after just seeing them for a few minutes. Also the interesting thing is Dr. Gottman, he was just interested in researching this. He didn't want to fix anything. He was just curious how dynamics in relationships play out. And it was actually his wife, Julie, who pointed out to him and she said, dude, this is really powerful stuff. Like you should turn this into something and help people, help couples, like utilize this information. And especially his four horsemen of the apocalypse have gotten a lot of applause for their accuracy and like what tears relationships apart. Now these are relationship dynamic patterns that we've probably all experienced. So as we go through them, I want you to think about past times in your life where relationships maybe have fallen apart, have crumbled, have gone into conflict. And maybe you'll recognize this pattern, one of these four patterns in your own dynamic, whether it be as we're going to go through stonewalling, whether it be actually criticism being defensive, these dynamics go in relationships that are not necessarily humming along, but when conflict arises, these dynamics will rear their ugly head. The first of the four horsemen that we want to talk about is criticism. And you might be nodding along saying, oh, totally I could see how this tears apart relationships. Many of us are criticizing, not recognizing the criticism in our communication. We've all been on the receiving end of criticism and know how painful that is, how difficult that is. But sometimes our own communication in relationships will bring criticism to the forefront of our partner, of our coworker, of our best friend, even though our intention is well-meaning. We wanna see them improve. We wanna see them grow. We wanna see a different side of them in the relationship or maybe we miss a side of them that they showed previously in the relationship that we're no longer seeing. But this criticism dynamic, when it comes up over and over again in relationships, it starts to fray your relationship trust for your partner, for your friend, for your coworker. The thing with criticism is that off the four horsemen, this is the one that is the most difficult to spot in yourself. Because I remember for myself, like criticizing people felt like helping them, getting helping them to get better by pointing out that they're doing this wrong and they're doing this wrong. Which doesn't really help the entire situation. There are different ways of giving that same information without actually criticizing. And of course, this follows cognitive distortion that there is a right and wrong way to do things just because you would present yourself in the relationship or you would communicate in a certain manner or you would behave in a certain manner. Doesn't mean that that's the right way to do something. And your partner, your friend, your coworker might be trying to behave in a new way, might be trying to grow in their communication, might be trying to grow in their behavior that might feel wrong to you based on past patterns in the relationship, past behaviors that you've become accustomed to. But criticism really leads the other person to feel less than in the relationship. And you may go in well-meaning saying, hey, Michael, I want the best for you. Like I want you to do these pull-ups the right way. I don't want you to do them the wrong way and not to get your muscles to grow. Or Michael, I really want you to hit this deadline. That's why I'm criticizing you. But in actuality, to be on the receiving end as we know, that really phrase your trust for that person that really leads you to pull back from the relationship, not to feel comfortable expressing yourself fully in those moments. And a good indicator of criticism are these absolutes. AJ, you're always late to our meetings when it's been like one out of 10, right? Or this, you never answer my emails on time. When you find yourself using these absolutes, always, never, and so on, you're probably in problematic territory. And the other person when they hear those absolutes, right? Our mind does not go to Michael, you're right. I never answer my email. Michael, you're right, I'm always late to meetings. My mind immediately goes to the last email that I responded to on time. And I go, you said never, but I have this data point that shows you're wrong, Michael. And now we get in a right or wrong argument, right? Now we're raising the conflict. I wanna say that argument that comes back to that cognitive distortion. So because binary thinking, and that's what it's called, it's either right or wrong, left or right this way or that way or never or always is easier. It's the easy way to think about things because it makes things simple. It's either good or it's bad. It's either right or it's wrong. That gives you clear cut pathways and behavior and how to think. And it makes our job as a human being easy because we don't have to put any thought to it. We go, what's the best way? Oh, well, it's this way. Oh, that's the best way, that's the way I will go. So that thinking correlates then to our actions and of course through our actions, also into our worldview and then into our communication. And so as we grow older, we begin to realize that things are much more nuanced than that and that two things can be true at the same time and that there's many different ways of acting or seeing or interpreting the world around you. But again, this comes back to our human body trying to figure out ways to conserve energy. And so binary thinking is one of those ways. Now, in a work environment, you can understand that if you're trying to get the team on board with a certain outcome or you're trying to get certain processes in place where you feel strongly that there is a right and wrong way by bringing in criticism, it creates a dynamic within the team that others now feel comfortable criticizing others. And now everyone feels the need to watch their back, right? They're concerned, well, if I step out of line, am I gonna get reamed, am I gonna criticize? And that hurts productivity, that hurts motivation. You don't really wanna show up if you're looking over your shoulder wondering, well, is the criticism coming my way next? And with the always and never framing of things, naturally the person who's hearing it is gonna find the data point, is gonna find a reason to prove you wrong. And now you're both in a situation where you feel the other is wrong. So how do you move forward from that? And if this is repeated, you can see it fraying that rope of a relationship. So it's hanging on by a single strand till you don't actually wanna be around that person because you feel judged, you feel seen in a negative light over and over and over again. And we've heard time and time again, oh, just use a compliment sandwich, right? Johnny, you're such a great guy. You never answer email on time, but I really love the energy and enthusiasm you bring to meetings. Oh, come on, how is Johnny gonna respond to that, right? He's not gonna take the sandwich, the bread and that sandwich in any meaningful way. He's still gonna default to the fact that I use never or I use always in the framing of the situation that I'm having with Johnny. So how do we start to adjust our communication? What's the antidote to this situation that we might find ourselves in? So the first thing you wanna do when it comes to criticism because criticism, a form of it is necessary. I mean, if you are in a work environment, you need to be able to point out what other people could be doing better. But the way to go about it is to not start a full-blown criticism attack, but to have a sort of a gentle startup to it.  And studies show that conversations that start gently usually end gently as well as opposed to dropping that hydrogen bomb of you're always doing this thing and starting the conversation that way. And in that regard, it's also important to talk about the I instead of the you because that's where the finger-pointing goes, right?  It's accusation.   And look at the agency that created for Johnny, right? Johnny can go, well, I don't want Michael to be frustrated with a sandwich on his desk. So what control do I have? Oh, I can take my sandwich. But if you go directly into you, Johnny, Johnny no longer has agency. It's just an attack, right? He now feels really vulnerable because he's being singled out. He's being called out. And I love the framing of the gentle startup. This is really important because I'm a little bit frustrated. I'm a little concerned. I'm a little confused, right? Just that framing versus always and never and waiting, right? Oftentimes we feel most comfortable criticizing when we've waited for a preponderance of evidence, right? You wait till the 30th late email, the 45th time I'm late to the meeting for you to finally say, you're always this, right? Now, instead of coming to me the first time and saying, hey, it's a little frustrating for me. I have a tight calendar with our X Factor coaching calls and our unstoppable members. And when you're late to meetings, I feel like I'm rushed then going into these coaching sessions which are really important to me, right? Bringing that up and communicating that the first instance, instead of waiting to the 30th, the 40th, the 50th instance, will often get us to a resolution and again create that team environment. Now, if we bring this into the romantic realm, many of us with our romantic partners, especially during this time are spending more time than ever with them. So if you're getting criticized in one area and you live together, you're doing activities together, you have hobbies and passions together, well, all of a sudden you're now gonna start looking for, where am I gonna get criticized next, right? It's not just the trash going out. It's not just the bed not being made. Oh man, now I'm gonna get in trouble for the laundry or the hamper piling up. So it's important to realize that that gentle start creates space and agency for the other person to feel like they're participating in the solution versus they're the problem. And in regards to them being part of the solution, I find it also very useful in turning criticism into constructive feedback by asking what they think about it. So AJ, for me, it's difficult when you're a little bit late because I have these other appointments like back to back, so I'm a little bit stressed. So I'm wondering what you're thinking of maybe we change the time around this, would it help you if so and so maybe we can do plan A or plan B, what are your thoughts on this? And boom, immediately, instead of putting the blame on you, I am the one who's working with you against the problem. It's the three of us against the problem of traffic congestion or insert any other problem that might interfere with the time, the appearance. Yeah, in those moments, I like to blame Puppers. I know, I know. These things, in a relationship context, both parties need to feel that they have a say in these conversations and working towards a resolution which we'll get into in another episode. So the more the other person has an opportunity to contribute to that conversation and the result of that conversation, the more buy-in that you have from both parties. You're getting what you wanted and the other person feels that they had a hand in that resolution. That buy-in is important. That allows everyone to walk away feeling that that was a productive conversation and that both parties got what they wanted. Now, this goes hand-in-hand with the second horseman, which is defensiveness. So imagine when you hear you're always or you're never, well, your mind starts racing to that moment where you did answer Michael's email on time, that moment where I did take the trash out just after Amy had asked me, that moment to you actually showing up for your best friend and not being late in the Uber and not missing the appointment. All of that then leads you into a defensive posture, right?  And this right and wrong thinking, we get in this endless cycle where, okay, you're right, I was wrong there, but here's the three ways that you've been wrong, right? And now we try to balance it in the other direction, even if we do feel pinned down by that one issue. So maybe I have been late to meetings, but now I'm gonna tell you, Michael, all the different ways you've wronged me. And in this defensiveness, we never actually get to a resolution, right? We never actually get to a place where we can constructively build together, build towards repairing the relationship. We create very similar dynamics through criticism and defensiveness in response to it. And the reason we're not getting towards a solution is because we're not, that's not even our intention to find a solution. Like our intention, my intention is to show you that I'm right and you're wrong, and you're doing exactly the same thing. And we can never, like we'll never get to a point where one of us agrees and says, oh yeah, you know what? I was absolutely wrong the entire time and you were absolutely right. So both sides need to see that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It might lean more towards the one end or the other, but it's definitely not the case that one person is 150% right and the other is minus 50% wrong. That makes sense. There's always something in the middle. I think it's also important to understand here that the defensiveness that you might be feeling is natural. You're not a bad person for feeling defensive or looking for a way out when criticism or complaints go your way. We all do that. What is important is to recognize I'm in a heightened emotional state due to the complaint or criticism that is coming my way. That heightened emotional state is making me defensive and it is showing up in three ways. Fight, which is I'm going to go on the attack and start criticizing you or give you, well, what about this and what about that to divert the criticism and complaint my way on to you? Or flight, which we'll get into later. That's another horseman where the person just leaves the situation. Or freeze, which is they play the game with a victim. Woe is me. You're always beating up on me. You always have some criticisms of me. It's always my fault. Oh, well, and I'm gonna now play the victim in hopes that then you'll feel bad for me. Your sympathy and empathy will kick in and you will leave me alone. And that's such a good point, Johnny, because all three of those reactions fight, flight and freeze. What do they do? They narrow your perspective. Like if you're out in the Savannah and you're looking for coconuts and there's suddenly a lion showing up and you're going to either fight or flight, hopefully flight, everything narrows down. And you can think about only one thing and that is escape right away. Escape right away or fight right away or freeze right away. Nothing says, let me look at this situation from both angles and see where I might be a little bit wrong or where I'm needlessly defensive. These conditions are evolutionarily designed to narrow you and make you really effective in either fighting or fleeing, but not like starting to find a compromise. And let's be honest, ego is definitely involved. There's no getting around it. Whether it's our romantic relationships with our best friends, with our family members or even our coworkers, we all try to show up as the best version of ourselves. We're all trying to do our best. We're, unless we're sociopathic, we're not trying to get one over on people. We're not trying to set them up for failure. We're showing up in the best way that we know how. And sometimes that means being stuck in traffic on the way to studio. Sometimes that means forgetting to respond to that email because you opened a nod on your iPhone.  Whatever the reason may be, you're still trying your best. You're still showing up for these relationships in the best way that you know how. And yet we find that ego getting defensive because we've been criticized. And we don't want our partner to think less of us. We don't want our coworkers or our boss to think we're not performing at a high level. We don't want our best friends to think we don't care about them. So this is a normal part of the process. But the problem is when defensiveness shows up again and again and again in the face of any criticism. So how do we overcome this hurdle? And how do we manage this horseman of the apocalypse in our relationships? Well, I think this one is, I think most of our listeners might have already spotted the possible antidote here. It starts with taking responsibility, not for the entire thing, unless you know that the other person is absolutely right. But you take responsibility at least in part. You make that concession by saying, yeah, you're right. Like every once in a while, I am actually late or lazy or distracted, and I don't have a good excuse. Like I'm sorry about that. And on the other side, you also accept the other person's perspective. You're not going into this like, no, this person is wrong. I am right. But it's like, listen and see that there is a certain amount of truth in the other person's perspective and certainly 100% truth in the eyes of the other person. So we need to have that in mind. And then also offer that apology, that honest apology for screwing up a little bit here and there and owning up to that. And not in the primary kind of school way. I was like, say you're sorry. I'm sorry. It's like, no, actually, be honest about that. You're actually sorry. And maybe even add how you think that you screwing up made the other person feel. So I'm really sorry that I totally forgot to answer your email. I'm sure that must have been frustrating for you because I know you were waiting for an answer and I just completely forgot. I'm sorry about this. Now, I was talking to one of our X Factor Accelerator members about this and the power of apologies. Because sometimes we think an apology is just saying, I'm sorry, and then tacking whatever else we want on it. So I'm sorry you feel that way. It's not taking responsibility. It's not an apology that actually moves you out of the defensive stance. It's a defensive apology, right? You're sorry for their feelings, but you're not taking any responsibility of your actions that led to them feeling that way for their perspective based on what you actually did in that moment. So just because you're saying, I'm sorry, whether it's through your gritted teeth like Michael was showing, or whether it's, hey, I'm sorry. If you are just adding for you feeling that way or because you feel that way, you're not actually taking the responsibility that allows you to move out of the defensiveness and again, move towards a resolution that the other person not only feels heard, not only feels validated, which we know from Dr. John Gottman's work is incredibly important to building relationships with others, but also works to rectify the situation. And by proposing solutions, right?  Or maybe it's, hey, you know what? I'm gonna check in 30 minutes before I leave on traffic and if I'm for sure gonna be late, then let's just push the meeting and let's work to schedule these meetings a little later in the day because I know traffic here in LA is insane at this hour. So you're taking responsibility, you're apologizing for the damage that's been done and you're offering solutions. So the other person, your partner, your friend, your coworker, your family member feels like, okay, I understand that I've been heard and I'm part of the solution. We're working together on this versus defensiveness, which just leads to the other person feeling defensive, right? It just leads to the other person retreating, digging their heels in and now saying, okay, I gotta come into the next argument with all of my guns blazing because this is not an acceptable apology or an acceptable solution to the issue that I'm having. In regards to the apology, there's a really interesting study that came out recently where most people would say, well, I don't know how I made the other person feel. Maybe it was frustrated, maybe it was sad, maybe it was angry. I don't know how I made them feel. How do I add that to my apology when I don't know how I made the other person feel? And the study looked at the difference between emphatic accuracy versus emphatic effort. And what it found out is that most people thought that the important piece of this was getting the emotion right, the accuracy. But in actuality, what really helped was that the other person saw that there was an effort being made. So I might be getting it wrong. I might be saying, hey, sorry, AJ, I must have infuriated you by this and this.  But the fact that I'm trying to get into your head and feel what you're feeling by the wrongdoing that I've done, that's what makes the apology so powerful, the effort. Yeah, the expression of the empathy is more important than mind reading, which we know is another logical fallacy. We can't read someone's mind, but when we're using empathy to put ourselves in their position, to feel the potential emotions that they may have felt, it adds a gravity to that apology. It adds a seriousness and a sincerity to the apology that allows the other person, again, to feel heard and validated. Because the last thing we want in these situations of conflict is for you or both of you or the other party to walk away feeling completely invalidated, completely shut down, like their emotions don't matter, their perspective of the situation doesn't matter, their viewpoint, their experiences don't matter to you because yours trumps theirs. Your experience is right, your emotion is right and theirs is wrong. So Johnny touched on the third, which is stonewalling, right? So if we completely withdraw, so okay, we're in an argument, Michael is ready to blast me with being late and I just go, you know what, I'm signing off today. I'm jumping off Zoom, turn off my phone. I'm not gonna respond to that email. You're not gonna hear from me until tomorrow. You may think that's a coping mechanism for you, right? Like, oh, if I'm in a heightened emotional state or I'm in a potential conflict, I'm just gonna withdraw until it simmers down. It allows me to think through what I'm feeling and not overreact. But in actuality, that does a lot of damage to the other person in that relationship to feel that you don't care, to feel that you just completely shut down and withdrew yourself entirely from a conversation that's really important to them.  But it can also happen in a physical space when we're actually sitting across from each other. Gottman called this physiological flooding where it's not a conscious decision to behave in that way, but where our nervous system is just overloaded. Our heart rate goes up, our hands become sweaty and our prefrontal cortex just switches off. It goes into that fight, flight, freeze response Johnny was talking about. So it's not always a decision that we make to Stonewall. It's our body taking over. And this is why it's important to be aware and to learn emotional regulation. The first part of that is to understand when you're in a heightened emotional state, to identify the triggers that put you into a heightened emotional state. And for a lot of times, for a lot of us, when we are consciously aware of it, it's already too late. It's like a car that is overheating. The check engine light is the subconscious like, hey, you just hit some triggers, you're probably gonna be in a heightened emotional state. But once the car is steamin' and broke down outside the road, it's already too late. The emotions are in the driver's seat and you're in the passenger seat and for you to gain control of where that's going to go is going to be a lot of work. You have to fight through all those emotions. For our clients, it is one of the very first step in the X Factor accelerator for our clients to learn and identify their own triggers and mechanisms that puts them in that heightened emotional state. And let's be honest. Again, to be on the receiving end of the ego bruise, that is criticism, to be on the receiving end of an argument that you weren't expecting to be called out for something that you thought you might have slid under the radar, right? You thought the trash going out at the end of the day was gonna be okay. You thought you got away with it. And all of a sudden, the other person is like, that really hurt my feelings. That really frustrated me.   It may feel very good in that moment to self soothe while this physiologic response is going on to just like withdraw, to cross your arms, to close your body language, to look down, to avoid eye contact, to lower your voice and speak very meekly because you don't want things to move forward. But in actuality, it's doing a lot of damage to the trust that you've built in that relationship with the other person because they feel like they can't vocalize, they can't share with you, they can't communicate with you, what matters to them in the relationship, what behaviors and actions are important to them and how they expect to be treated. AJ, I wanna touch on something you mentioned there about eroding that trust to be able to have these difficult conversations. If you are in a loving relationship or even a platonic relationship that you cherish and if you have these relationships, I hope that you do cherish them, well that you're gonna wanna make sure that the other person fills that they can come to you with anything. And I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of couples who always say, well, me and the wife or the husband and I, we've declared that we always have open lines of communication, that we can come to each other for anything. Well, it's wonderful that you believe that and it's wonderful that you say that out loud, but do you do the work to keep those lines of communication open? Those lines of communication have been earned to be opened. Once those lines of communication are opened, when you come to your partner and they show contempt or defensiveness or they stonewall or they blow up because of the issue that you wanna discuss, well, why is that person gonna feel good about coming to you the next time? So how you handle these important conversations dictate whether those lines of communication remain open or closed. And what's hard and difficult here is if you find yourself having to get outside help, a mediator, perhaps a psychologist or counsel, therapist, the reality is that those lines have been damaged somewhat to a certain degree where you need outside help. Could those lines of communication stay open had these conversations been handled differently? Well, sure. And first of all, relationships are not easy. They are difficult. You work for these relationships. That's why you should cherish them due to the work that you have put in to develop those relationships. And as we talked in the past, most relationships start with us on our best behavior, putting our best foot forward, only showing them our best side. And then over time, the more time spent together, we're all human. Some of those imperfections and flaws in some of these patterns from past relationships come up, from the way your family handled conflict come up. So for me, one of my ex-girlfriends told me that I stonewalled. I had never heard of that term. I didn't know what that was. And I didn't realize that my physiological response to being criticized, to being called out in conflict was to completely withdraw and shut down. And then when I started to unpack that and do the work, I realized, well, that's exactly how my dad behaved in moments of argument. He would get so overheated and so angry that he was speechless and that he would just completely withdraw. And me and my sister had to fight tooth and nail to get his attention back, to get him to reengage with us, to get him to cool off, that's deemed to go away. So I was like, well, now this pattern, presenting it in my father, I see it now in myself. And a lot of these patterns to how we handle conflict, they're modeled for us through childhood. They allow us to feel good in the moment, but they sacrifice the relationship. They sacrifice the person on the other end, receiving the contempt, receiving the defensiveness, receiving the stonewalling. And over time, as Dr. Gottman shows, that's what ultimately leads to the breakup, to the divorce, to the dissolution of the friendship, to you not wanting anything to do with that person. And it's typically not the one action, the one experience, the one conflict. It's the repeated demonstration of these behaviors and these patterns in communication around conflict that lead to the distrust and lead to the other person saying, you know what, it's just not worth it. I can't do this anymore. I don't want to be in this situation because of these behaviors and actions. So you may have been on the receiving end of some and we may be actually doing these two others in our life. And part of the reason I want to do this episode is because when I recognize that pattern in my own life around stonewalling, I'm now consciously aware of it. It's not to say that I never do it. I still find myself from time to time in really heated conflict with my wife, wanting or even starting to stonewall, but it allows me to catch it and recognize that pattern. And to come back and apologize and say, you know what, Amy, I'm really sorry. I realize now that I was stonewalling you and that's kind of been my default response in these moments of intense conflict. That's not how I want you to feel. That's not how I want to show up in this relationship and I appreciate that you're so kind, giving compassion and understanding of these behaviors that I'm working on. Sometimes it takes a coach helping you unpack and talk through the situation to see other pathways to resolution. Sometimes it takes, as Johnny said, therapy, talking it out, bringing in a professional to help solve this, but these patterns come up again and again in relationships. It's not like Dr. Gottman looked at one couple and said, okay, I got the four horsemen here, let's go ahead and publish. This is after looking at tens of thousands of relationships and starting to recognize that these are well-worn human patterns to the way we communicate to the dynamics that show up in these relationships. And stonewalling, because there's the physiological response in the way that we move forward, we have to acknowledge that that's going on and that acknowledgement might mean, hey, let's take five minute walk, let's take 10 minutes, let's do a breath exercise, let's move to a new environment, let's work to get our physiology back to a state where we can communicate comfortably. The stonewalling is really damaging if no resolution is ever found, no solution, no apology, no responsibility is taken, and you just let that simmer.  Maybe your coworker won't remember the last three times you've been late to that meeting. Maybe your best friend, is it gonna worry about the fact that you haven't venmowed him back and this is the fourth time he's requested it? When you stonewall, there's an implicit removal of responsibility from yourself. It's just like, I'm just gonna withdraw, I'm gonna go turtle mode, I'm gonna pull back into my shell and I'm gonna wait for a calmer seize here and hope that the other person just lets it slide, forgets about it, doesn't worry about it. And that is so devious because it is a physiological response. Like it's not stonewalling if someone says, okay, this is an argument I don't want to have, I'm going to stonewall now. It's that fight, flight, freeze response that happens with or without us knowing. So like you said, H, like recognizing that this is a pattern and then recognizing that, oh, I'm doing it right now, will often for many people, also result in the realization that they can do nothing about it. They are in fight, flight, freeze response right now. And the only thing they're able to do is recognize that's where they are stuck right now. And that's also where the solution comes in that conscious taking a break. Hey, I wanna have this conversation, I'm not turning my back on you, but I need to center myself first. Let's do a timeout, let's do 20 minutes. Let's spend that time apart. And I promise you, after these 20 minutes, we'll meet here again at this table and we'll have this conversation. But right now I can't contribute to it. So let's just hit the pause button, 20 minutes. I'm going to go for a walk, you can go for a walk, get a hot beverage or whatever it is, spend that time apart with a promise to meet again soon after and then have that conversation. You have to show up at minute 20.  That really damages the relationship. And we talk about this and we actually demonstrate this in our X Factor Accelerator Bootcamp Experience. This positive body language trigger to the physiology. When you're directly facing one another, when you're in a moment of conflict or confrontation and you feel that other person's entire attention is on you like a spotlight is on you, it can trigger this physiologic response and you're just over energized and all of those chemicals are flowing through your body and you feel put on the spot, right? We have a lot of terminology around this exact physiology that we're talking about here. And just by moving to neutral body language and we do this exercise inside of the program where in conflict resolution, you actually go from directly facing the person you're in conflict with to being shoulder to shoulder and allow the conflict to be in front of you instead of between you, you can actually start to see this physiologic response alleviate in that conflict. Even though we're role playing it in the classroom and our X Factor Accelerator Participants are like, wow, I feel completely different. Watching it, you feel different. You can see the tension release. So for Amy and myself, not to drag Puppers into it again, but in a lot of these moments where I might feel that need to be stonewalled, I'll say, let's go take Puppers on a walk and let's get out of this environment. Let's get out of the house. Let's get out of the mall or the restaurant or ever the discomfort or the argument might be going on. Let's take them on a walk. We're shoulder to shoulder, holding hands, facing forward and let's talk through what's going on here. And I found that that has worked wonders for me by moving my body, by changing the environment, by positioning myself next to Amy instead of in a direct confrontational position with Amy. It allows me to work through that ingrained physiological response that I have to like, freeze, back away, avoid. I don't wanna get involved in this discussion. Well, in these discussions, the tension can be palpable. And if it can be palpable, that means that though you might not see anything, that tension is sitting there. So if that conversation continues, it's just going to build and build and build. And the other part about it for us men is, well, and for women as well, no one wants to allow the tension to build to a degree where we lose control because at that moment, we could do something that could damage the relationship permanently if not harm ourselves or each other. And so moving around, taking a break, leaving the room, change of scenery, this allows an opportunity for that tension to dissipate. Sometimes it's the car ride home from the restaurant. Sometimes it's a walk around the block, but it's you also being open and honest and vulnerable with your partner. Hey, I'm feeling this urge to withdraw. You know, maybe it's not labeling it stonewalling, maybe you never heard that term before, but I'm really feeling this urge right now that I need to flee. I do wanna have this conversation with you. I don't want these emotions running through it. I don't want an outburst. I don't want the physiology of what's going on to lead me to act out of character, to say something even more hurtful to you, to let my emotions get the best of me. I care deeply about you. I care about this relationship. I just need a moment to collect myself. Let's reconvene at this time and follow through, right? I mean, that part is so key. You're not sliding this under the rug. And as Dr. Gottman shows, these repeated horsemen and their arrival in the relationship, it leads to the end of that relationship. The other person can't possibly feel comfortable moving forward when these dynamics are at play in every disagreement, in every argument, in every frustration. And when we talk about the last one here, the last one for me feels, it's kinda like the final straw in the relationship. I know he equates the four of them, but I feel oftentimes we get to this place of contempt after repeated appearances of the other three horses in the ring, right? It's like the circus.  You think less of them. You've taken that vision that you had of they're a great person, they mean well, they really care about you, and now they're low value. They're someone that you don't hold in high regard any longer. And that contempt, much like we're talking about stonewalling, that's also palpable. I've gone to dinner with Amy and we could watch a couple sitting next to us where the partner is just expressing sheer contempt. And it's like, countdown to breakup, countdown to divorce, like this does not look good. We can pick it up on others, but sometimes we're not so attuned to picking it up when it's coming from our partner. And of course it's terrible when it's coming from us towards our partner. And this is not only seeing your partner as someone who has become low value, even more scaringly, you're saying things with the intent to attack and to insult, like you're purposefully bringing these words and are subconsciously whatever it might be, but the point of what you're saying is to hurt. And that's where it becomes dangerous. And for a very good reason, contempt is the best predictor of divorce in Gottman studies. With it being so damaging, with it being probably the one that's the clearest indicator when you're feeling it, when you're experiencing it, when it's going on, that things are about to unfold in a very negative light. What are the strategies that we can use to actually catch ourselves to break the contempt cycle? Because if it gets to this point, we've really reached a tipping point in the health of that relationship long-term. And we wanna do everything we can to keep us from getting to this place of contempt with our partners, friends, our coworkers, and family. The thing here is that when it comes to contempt, you can really only work on yourself. Like when you realize there's this person in your life, coworker, partner, whatever, when the relationship is really important, and you detect that contempt in yourself, and you realize like, I don't want to have this, like I want this person in my life, you can work on your own feelings of contempt and redirecting them. And you do that by recalibrating your perception filters, like have a list of things that you appreciate in the other person. If this is a partner, maybe you have a notepad next to your toothbrush, and whenever you're brushing your teeth, you're thinking of three things that you appreciate about that person.  You can also make it a habit to point those things out to the other person and saying, well, AJ, you know what this, thank you so much for replying to this email. Thank you so much for giving me feedback on this slide deck. Like that was immensely helpful. Thank you so much for that. I know that when I need feedback, you got my back and I appreciate that. So that's how you work on those contempt attacks on your own side. However, that only works on your side. Like if someone has contempt for you, unfortunately, that's still a little bit of a different problem because you can't influence that very much. Amy and I have a practice of simply answering the question what I love about you. So we've had a number of guests on the show talk about gratitude. And we have a daily gratitude practice where we ask each other what we're grateful for. And the impact on finding the positive through all of the turmoil, all of the upheaval, all of the frustrating moments that happen and it's just surviving here on this earth retrains your brain to look for those positive moments. And we've found that taking this one question what I love about you and answering it in regular intervals and check-ins allows us to keep that perception filter on the right things about the relationship, the reasons we want to be together. And I think part of the reason we get to a place of contempt is because our perception filter starts to only focus on the negatives, only focus on the trash overflowing, only focus on the lateness and not showing up to the meeting on time, only focus on the emails that went unanswered. And if you find that you're on the receiving end of that contempt, well, can you bring a practice like that into your relationship? Can you maybe not in the moment of conflict, but can you the next morning roll over to your partner and say, hey, I wanna share what I love about you and I'd love to hear that in return. And can you start to work together as a team to recalibrate and shift that perception filter back to all the reasons that matter in the relationship, the reasons you are together because we know over time that we're all on different trajectories. We've talked about this on the show in the past too and there are gonna be moments where you're on a sky high trajectory, your partner might be backsliding in their career, might be having some health issues, might be being frustrated by family members and not in their best state, physically, mentally, emotionally. And because of that, there has to be a recalibration together of the perception filter to reinvest in that relationship, to reinvest in the reasons that you are together. And you can do this, maybe it's not love, as guys we probably don't sling around love for our friends as much as we should, but what I appreciate about you, what I really enjoy, what matters to me. If you bring that practice into the relationships in your life that matter, we do it in situations at work, we do it in situations with our family. I had some conflict around the wedding with my family last year and I found myself just sort of defaulting to negative thoughts and my perception filter was on all the things that were frustrating me, the expectations I had built up around them. And I just actively started bringing into my conversations with them what I appreciated, the things they were doing that mattered to me when I felt love from them around the wedding. It changed the tone of those conversations from like them focusing on the negative or me focusing on the negative. So I know you can't control someone else. I know you can't read their thoughts and their intentions or their emotions, but we can bring a practice into our communication that leads to that influences the other person in the way they're showing up and what they're communicating back to us. And I think in all of these situations, for me, it's the realization that there's two people in this relationship, there's two perspectives, there's two realities, there's two sets of emotions, there's two sets of values that are in conflict here that maybe aren't seeing the reality. Can we work together with the intention of having this relationship stay strong, its importance to us, to move beyond these four horsemen? So I'm curious about that habit that you and Amy have. How does it work? Like what's the tactic behind it? Do you just randomly start? One thing I love about you is X and then she replies or is there something that you do at a specific time of the day? How exactly do you work with that? We have the daily gratitude practice that we try as best as we can, both of us to ask throughout the day. So it started originally every morning but now our work schedules don't always align. So sometimes one of us is running out to the gym and the other person's hopping on a call. So the daily gratitude practice is one of us recognizing, okay, let's ask this of our partner. Every week we go on Friday night, sushi date night here in LA. And those are the moments for our relationship check-in and those are the moments where we share that one thing that we love about each other. And there are certainly other moments where I'll just look over or she'll look over and it comes to mind. But having that bookend to our week on Friday nights that we carve out together and as we start a family it's a practice and a ritual that we wanna keep. I think allows us to strengthen our relationship no matter what the world has thrown at us. And because you know that once it's Friday evening and you're sitting next to the running sushi now it's time to share this one thing you appreciate about each other. That also means that throughout the week you unconsciously or consciously look for something so that when you're sitting in front of your avocado sushi, you actually have something to say, right? So on Monday you're already, oh yeah, I could mention this and then on Tuesday you're like, oh yeah, I could mention this as well. And then you might actually like, okay, I can only share one thing like, well, whatever is like the one thing I found on Monday or the one on Wednesday? That sounds like an amazing practice. The beauty of it for me is that it's actually the smaller details that are the most meaningful. So when you start this practice you kind of think like, oh, it's gonna be the grand gestures or the moment I rode in on the white horse and saved the day for Amy or the moment that she went on of her way to do something really spectacularly for me. But it's actually the smaller moments where you notice something beautiful in your partner and sharing that with intentionality that I find like lighten us up the entire weekend and stick with us. So I know it can sound daunting at the start, like, oh my God, it's like, what is the meaning of life? What do I love about you, right? And you think about writing wedding vows and you think about movies and romantic comedies and all of these things, these overt messages that are sent around love. But I've actually found it's the smallest details in the moments where you're probably least thinking that your partner is finding you or seeing you in that loving light that are the most meaningful.  Yeah. Makes no sense. It keeps the floor a lot cleaner. So in listening to this, and I recommend this to all of our X Factor accelerator members, just the power of journaling, think around the last one or two major conflicts you've had. Like maybe you recognize that you're drifting apart from a friend or maybe a family member or a sibling has just really been getting on your nerves lately or maybe it is your partner is just gonna figure out there your spouse. Think about the last conflict you really had and journal about it. The emotions have waned, the physiological responses that we've talked about here have drifted away. Think through your behaviors and actions and your communication. Think through their behaviors and actions and their communication and use this podcast as a lens to unpack what are these dynamics going on in the relationships that matter to you and you might find some new insight in the way that you approach communication moving forward. You might find some insight in the way your partner or your friend or family member is showing up in their relationship and that maybe there were some things you were doing that were triggering the four horsemen in them or maybe there's some things that they're doing that are triggering the four horsemen in you. But this episode, understanding these four dynamics really empowers you in every relationship to strengthen it which we know from Robert Waldinger's work, the Harvard Happiness Study, ultimately those relationships translate to a rich meaningful life, translate to physical health, right? We're talking about four horsemen.  And if we can strengthen the relationships in our life we can live a meaningful life and we can actually live a healthier life. So that was really my goal in sitting down with Michael and Johnny today, recognizing some patterns in my own life and my relationship and some intentionality that I'm moving forward with to the relationships that really matter. I think we solved it.


Good morning John the project for awesome is happening one week from today. It's snuck up on us. Here it is surprise every year since 2007 we've done a charity livestream 48 hours long lots of guests many goofs And it's very fun and it is starting a week from now here on the vlogbrothers channel at youtube.com Vlogbrothers maybe you're thinking I know all this I know all about the project for awesome I don't need to watch this video. Please watch this video. We have changed things It's gonna be different this year than it ever has been and I want you to know about it first difference We are going to be using a new platform for our fundraising portion of the event. It's called tiltify It's designed explicitly for charity live streams because though like that's the world. We're in now This is exciting a huge portion of the money We raised during the project for awesome is people donate money and in exchange they get perks And that will all happen on tiltify now the tiltify will be open on Wednesday of next week You can start seeing all the perks that are available then though it won't be everything I wrote a short story for the project for awesomeness here called bonker doesn't die in which April May the main character from my Books goes to VidCon and it has to rescue a pig a celebrity internet pig because I can do that So head on over there next Wednesday It will be open during the entire project for awesome Of course these are all things that are only available during project for awesome and during some portions of the event your donations will be matched So you might give ten dollars for my tiktok drafts But it's gonna become thirty dollars for charity money raised during the first half of the project for awesome We'll go to save the children and partners in health two organizations that are very effective at Decreasing the overall amount of suck in the world during the second half of the project for awesome The money will go to organizations voted on by you Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself There are four ways you could participate in the project for awesome number one You can come and join our live stream tell people about it change your Twitter bio Make sure everybody knows and they come and they hang out and it's fun number two You could donate money you could do that at the tiltify Which will open on Wednesday and you'll get perks in exchange for your donation Or you can just donate money at fightworldsuck.org if you want to give a larger amount like you want to be part of our matching fund you can email us at FTWS at Complexly comm foundation to decrease world suck at complexly comm matching funds can only come in until 12 p.m Eastern time on February 10th So email us before then third you can make a video promoting a charity that you are excited about and believe in previously We opened submissions for those videos the day the project for awesome began We are not doing that anymore That was like a relic of the time when we were trying to game the YouTube algorithm Which hasn't been a thing for like ten years So to give our volunteer team time to go through the videos and decide which ones we might want to feature during the live stream We are getting those submitted early this year So make a video talking about the impact the organization has it has to be made specifically for the project for awesome And you can submit it at project for awesome comm you got tips for how to make great videos there We got graphics you can use but you have to submit them by noon eastern on February 10 So you got less than a week to do that but hey Every vlogbrothers video is made in less than a week and finally at project for awesome comm during the live Stream you'll be able to vote on your favorite charities to determine which ones are going to get part of the money We raised during the second half it is the most wonderful time of the year Thank you in advance for joining us whether you do one or none or all four of the things Thank you for being a part of this community. I'll see you during the live stream It's gonna be a very silly time starting out February 12th at noon eastern time John I'll see you on Tuesday, and I will also see you next Friday. I'm trying to dab I can't there's some invisible force that's preventing me from dabbing. Oh, well, that's probably just a joke. I can't do it


Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vulture Institute of Technology, Solopur. We are going to study in this series thermodynamics fundamentals in detail. In the first video, which deals with concepts of thermodynamics, we are going to discuss and try to understand the thermodynamics fundamentals in detail. Now, before we start any say module, we must know what is the outcome of it. So, let us see. When you complete this video, you will be able to define the system and surroundings, identify thermodynamic properties and you will be able to explain quasi-static process. Now, the important thing is, these things appear to be trivial, but in thermodynamics, they play a very important role. Now, first of all, what is system and what is surroundings? So, if I ask you, what is system? Now, generally, anything that is under consideration or on which we put our focus is the system. Now, this is a very vague concept and if I ask you, suppose there is a one bottle, it is closed by a cap and say, suppose there is water inside and if I ask you what is the system, then a novice will be not in a position to tell in detail exactly what the system is. For that, we must know what is the system. You know that in water, if you take, I have to define it. If I take air here, I have to define it. If I take atmosphere, I have to define it means any quantity of matter or subject under focus must be explained with the help of certain parameters. Now, if I ask you, how will define this particular say water condition? So, some may say that it has got certain pressure. Some may say it has got some temperature. Some may say it has got number of moles. Some may say that it has got certain amount of enthalpy. Some say it may have energy. Some say it may have availability or some may say that it has got some Gibbs energy. Then, if you see, it has got definite volume also. So, these are the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. These are the parameters by which we can define a system. Now, the question is, if I am focusing on water itself, then water is my control volume. Means, any change in the water I am interested in. In that situation, I am not bothered about what is happening to the air. But if water is a system, then I have to confine my focus only on this part. If air is a system, I have to say that air has got some pressure, some temperature, some mole, some internal energy and so many parameters. Now, the first thing is, this is not sufficient to understand. The system must interact. Now, the system must interact with the surrounding. So, this system may give energy. This may get work heat. This may get some work or this may produce some amount of work. So, either it will be Q given in or out. W given in or out. So, by this, you will find that the concept of system is very flexible. If I say there is a block, that is a metal block and if it is to be defined, how I define? I give it the dimensions. Then by the dimensions, I mean length, volume, length, breadth and height and dimensions are fixed. It is a solid. I may give its density. I may give its temperature. The system is well defined. If I supply heat to it, then it will change the dimensions. There is some volume strain. There is some compressibility. If the some motion is constrained, suppose I am constraining this motion. So, I can define system in variety of ways. Say for example, if I say consider a piston and cylinder assembly, there is a gas inside and if gas is my focus, then if I heat it, the piston will move to the right side. If I compress it, gas will be heated. So, by this, it is clear to you that system is a well defined thermodynamic quantity, parameter or say entity. Now, it is interacting with the surrounding and surrounding is not a vague concept. Many students have a problem that they say that anything of say excluding the system is surrounding. It is not like that because if I say that surrounding is something vague, then I am not in a position to find out what changes have taken place in the surrounding because surrounding itself is a well defined system. So, the correct thermodynamic representation of a system is this is one my system and this is the surrounding. So, between system and surrounding, there is heat and work interaction. So, either Q or heat, sorry work will be transferred and you know that we are studying in detail also in say Q and W, the sign conventions. If heat is supplied, if Q is supplied to the system, we take it as positive. If it is rejected by the system, we consider it as negative and very important thing that is work done by the system is positive. This is very important and on the system is negative. Now, you may wonder in chemistry, it is exactly opposite. In chemistry, work done by the system is negative and work done on the system is positive because there are our criteria is different. In chemistry, we have to find out how fast the reaction will take place and in the reaction process exactly say which parameter will help the rate of reaction. Now, you know that if I supply heat to the particular chemical, heat rate of reaction will be more. Again, if I do some work on the chemical substances, there will be more amount of say completion chances and because of this, we say that work done on the system is positive in chemistry, but in physics and engineering, we have to be very particular about it. So, you have learned one thing, system and surrounding are two well defined systems. Surrounding is also a system, though it is not appearing like a system. Say for example, suppose this bottle, this bottle which I have kept here, if I kept in a small container. So, for this bottle, this itself container is a surrounding, but if I say that this container itself is kept in a big room, then for this container as a system, this entire room is a surrounding. So, everywhere surrounding and system are always defined in relation to each other. This is the first part. Second thing is work and heat transfers that we have talked about. So, these work and heat transfers are very important concepts in thermodynamics. In the sense, both are energy transfers. So, Q and W both are energy in transient. Now, what is the meaning of energy in transient?  Suppose, there is a cloud, what is this? This is a cloud in which there are water droplets. So, these are water droplets and these water droplets are in the cloud and there is one observer here. He is looking at the sky and by visualization, he sees that this particular cloud contains water. Now, my question is do we say that cloud contains rain? No, because when the water droplet falls, when they get a liquid temperature, then only it becomes rain. Means rain is water in transit. It has caused the boundary of the cloud. So, Q and W are energy in transit. So, whenever they cross the boundary, it is called as work or heat. Take a simple example. Suppose, this is a container in which there are number of molecules. I isolate this particular container, say chamber and this molecule is striking, this molecule, this is striking, this molecule, this is striking, this multi molecule because of this and the molecule is going here. But these are the transfers taking place inside and there is no external force acting. So, because of this, what happens? The work is not crossing the boundary and when work is not crossing the boundary, that is, it is cannot be called as a thermodynamic work. That is, the first thing that you must know as a basic learner. Again, there is some confusion. Suppose, I take this as a insulator system and say there is water inside or gas. If I put electric heater here, if I put electric heater here and if I ask you what I am transferring work or heat. Many students know that they have seen the geyser. They say that we are transferring heat, but it is wrong. It is not heat transfer. It is wrong. It is a work transfer because we are flowing current through the resistance and whenever anything goes through the resistance, it performs certain work. So, whenever there is a resistance to something, there is scope for work. Another simple example, you know, suppose I have two chambers and some membrane here. Here is some gas and here is some vacuum and this is insulated. Now, what happens when I puncture this, then automatically I get the gas moving from this to this system. So, because of this, there is no work done because there is no resistance to it. Now, you know that we can define the systems in very briefly as open system, closed system and isolated system. In open system, mass and energy both are allowed to transfer. In closed system, only energy is allowed and isolated mass and energy both are not allowed. Isolated system, classic example is your thermos flask. Open systems are normal open systems that we have and closed systems are very typical systems. When we allow only the energy transfer, not the work transfers. So, by this, it is clear to you that how the systems are classified, what is the property, how we define energy and how we differentiate between heat and work, their energy is in transit. We are studying in that in detail in our next slide when we go for calculation of work done for various processes. But before that, it must be clear to you that work and energy we define as the phenomenon in transit and work transfer is because of the parameters other than heat and heat transfer is a parameter only because of temperature difference. So, for this, I ask a simple question. Say, if there is a balloon, what is the boundary and whether it is fixed or flexible, think over it. Now, if you want to refer, you can refer thermodynamics by Nog and Sengel, Nog and thermodynamics by Yunus Sengel. So, thank you for this particular session.


What do you want?  This whole cake and all you want to do is nurse I You like it no Yeah And you want to open this one No, there are letters and numbers Noise Want to go down, you know just slide it open That's not smart He trying to figure out Ain't as low as the egg. Do I see a drum? You put batteries in it. For jessiah's birthday. I Can consider I was able to do everything I wanted to do with him I got him a little smash cake even though he will I can bougie and they want to smash in it after all his gifts We went to the zoo You know got him some balloons. Yeah, I just wanted him to get the experience of okay today is a special day It's different than every other day of the week. So even though he's one. I won't remember all of this I have pictures and videos and I didn't see it necessary to spend money and turn off big one birthday bash because one I have no friends in Orlando and Two like I don't I just don't see it necessary never have So people would say oh, they only turn one once You turn every age once okay, so Yeah, so he enjoyed his day The zoo exhausted him he was walking around looking at the animals laughing pointing like He do actually love animals, which is why he decides to take him to the zoo. He'll sit down and watch animal planet and stuff So I Think he actually enjoyed that until he started to get tired and a lot and see so then we left We were there for like about two hours So Yeah Today was a success Happy happy birthday to my sunshine. I cannot believe it's been a year already like time actually flies, but I Know that I consciously made sure that I enjoyed every stage From his newborn three months six months nine months Whatever like I enjoyed every stage the good the bad the ugly the great.   He Just he's so smart for his age and I know every mother says that every mother says Oh, my baby is so smart, but he's this boy is literally so smart and mature for his age that it amazes me and He's now walking he started walking at 11 months I Could I remember when he took those first two steps like it's just it's just It's so exciting.  He can point to his nose.  He loves to dance as soon as you hear music. He starts to dance. He loves to drum. He drums on everything What else This little boy is just so amazing. Oh, he loves to read He would go take a book off his shelf and sit down and just flip through it Like he just amazes me so much and this is he's been doing this before he even turned one like he loves to read He loves books Sometimes he's flipping through the books and rambling like if he's reading it himself. It's the cutest thing ever What else? Yeah, that's all I can think of at the moment from the top of my head, but His growth is amazing. He's growing so beautifully And I'm just excited to see what this next year has in store for us for him For my family like I'm actually excited. So, you know when he was getting like When he turned like nine months and so I was starting to get sad because I'm like, oh my gosh He's growing up so fast like he was literally just a little tiny baby boy. And now he's just this big tall Chunky boy walking around and following me around the house But I decided that it's not a reason to be sad just because he's growing quickly Because he's actually growing very beautifully and I should be proud. So I was excited for this day from then on and When he gets older I'll be able to show him this video and show him that you know He is truly loved and he's always been truly loved and was he can care of so Yeah, I I think it's important to document moments like this and amazing milestones, so I'm just happy that he's happy. He's healthy and he's growing and glowing. Okay, so Yeah, I am so proud to be his mother. So happy birthday Blessed earth strong to my sunshine my baby boy. Just say I'm Mackay Andrew. I love you.  This is so cute The aftermath toys everywhere. Now it's time to clean up