Hello and welcome to the Empowered Couples podcast where here you get modern, non-boring relationship advice for you and your partner to communicate like pros, fight smarter, and stay in the same team no matter the challenge that you face.

I am one of your hosts, Aaron Freeman.

And I'm Jocelyn Freeman, but you all just know it as the Freeman's.

And welcome to this episode on specific ways that effort declines in a marriage and five ways

to step it back up. If you've been a listener of ours, you know that we're never striving for

perfection. That's not what we're asking of you, but in today's episode, we are inviting you

to step it up, to be the best you can be, which doesn't have to be perfect. It's just putting effort and intention into specific areas that you forget about. An effort might sound like something really simple, but I've thought about this a lot. Sports gives us a great analogy, so don't let me lose any of the female listeners right off the bat. There's a lot of women that like sports do. I just want to say. That's true. That's true. Okay. My bad. My bad. Little generalization there. But maybe founded. Men like sports more, I believe. Either way, we get where we're going. So effort declines. and so when you think about that, you're probably like, oh, sure.

But I want to go deeper into that effort declines when you achieve what you set out to.

Now, in sports, we have a very clear picture of when this happens and what happens as an outcome of that.

So when you're an athlete or when someone is an athlete and reaches the pinnacle, many times they start to lose the hunger and the drive that initially got them there.

What I was thinking about before this podcast was those that have seen that movie Rush.

It's about Formula One race car drivers James Hunt, Nicky Lauda, and they battle for this for a

couple of seasons, and James Hunt ends up winning the championship.

And then he like flies off at the end of the movie.

And then it tells you that that was the last championship he won and he

retires like the next year where Nikki Lauda,

he went on to be one of the best Formula One racers of all time.

Now, another example we're all very familiar with would be Michael Jordan.

Now, he reached a pinnacle, won three championships, and then he goes off and plays baseball.

And that was like crazy.

I actually remember being a kid, like, why is he playing in the minor leagues for the White Sox?

This is the greatest basketball player already.

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