Episode 029-How I Shocked My Wife with the Not Forgotten Journal

Welcome to the ERW Podcast - I’m your host, BpB, fellow road warrior, a husband and father, on a stretch of visiting some really boring cities on business travel but the bad comes with the good. One of the hardest things about the road for me personally is the loss of time and connection with the love of life, my wife Susan.

RUNNING MAN Story

• Coming off a brutal stretch including international travel and back-to-back trade shows of up early for C-suite breakfast meetings and later evenings for corporate parties and customer dinners
• My wife and I were competing by text who was more tired considering she was raising my kids as a single mom in my absence, which remember, was a brutal stretch 
• I came around the corner and pulled into my drive way seeing only my wife’s arms and my youngest one at the time as a one year old doing Running Man Baby
• I’d like to say… Grabbed my baby / kissed my wife / embraced my kids / and gave my wife the night off for me to clean the house and take care of the kids
• But what I did… walked right by my beautiful and exhausted wife, heard my kids say “Daddy’s home” and said agitated “Daddy’s tired” and went to lay down on the couch in the family room.
• Who does that? I woke up to a beautifully angry wife who had tears in her eyes and let me know with a soft, strong tone: “Something needs to change"

It took what I learned as the three elements of Connect:

1. Connect Intentionally - on purpose
2. Connect Thoughtfully - reflective 
3. Connect Creatively - memorable

How did I do it

1. Reserved a couple of minutes every day on the road to write in the journal
2. Planned ahead - Think Space for ideas what to write
3. Chose one of the following to write about:

• Memory - funny / serious - song, scent, location, picture, food
• Encouragement
• Inspiration
• Appreciation 
• Feeling - missing home, lonely, 

Lessons Learned

1. You don’t have to wait and blow it like me to do something now
2. It was harder and easier than I thought - harder because I put a lot of pressure on myself and mine was super big / easier because it only took a couple of minutes per road day 
3. When I couldn’t think of what to say/write, I looked at a picture of my wife and asked myself “what would she need to hear from me?)
4. Having ideas to stimulate the creativity was huge - I needed the primer for the days I was in a hurry or just not feeling creative
5. This was not about me - so when I didn’t feel like it, I had to remind myself “this is for her, not me, and I cannot wait for her to read this page in the NFJ"