Discover Define Design: Create Structures & Take Action

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your host Brian and Jessilyn Persson, where we help professional couples resolve conflict and improve communication within their relationship. This episode, we’re going to focus on Design. As the creators of the Discover, Define, Design Framework, we are taking you through the Design piece of the framework to help you with any of the conflicts you have in your relationship, to help resolve and improve communication. So Design, this means creating or imagining a new solution for your situation, and adding structures that will allow your situation to succeed.

 

Brian Persson: [00:00:44] That’s right. So as per the last couple episodes we walked through Discover and Define. Those are how to explore the emotions of the situation and also uncover the facts of the situation. And we, in those episodes used a situation we had in the past, which caused a lot of tension and that was taking out the garbage. So we’re going to carry forward with the Design principle of the Discover, Define, Design Framework around taking out the garbage. So one of the first questions that we ask is what immediate actions are you committing to based on your design.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:25] Yeah. And on that, so the solution for me was to have you, of course, take out the garbage before it overflowed, and preferably without me having to ask. So the immediate actions for that situation that I contributed to was agreeing to tell you if I saw the garbage overflowing in case you weren’t around seeing it and asking you to put a item in your calendar to remind you that you need to take out the garbage.

Brian Persson: [00:01:58] Right, yeah. And we really lean on trying to get our Design to be immediate. So the actions that we are going to take towards anything we’re going to create into our future, we really aim to have it as a quick solution so it can’t, you know, wait a couple of years or wait a couple months, whatever it might look like to start acting on that design. Something has to be done immediately. And the reason is because you will succeed more if you take quicker action around whatever you’re trying to create in your life. And we’ve experienced that because any time we move quickly towards a particular goal of ours, we will maybe not hit it out of the park, but we will always move ourselves forward more so than if we just sat on it and and tried to think of like, the perfect solution.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:54] Yeah, it’s better to take action and fail than to take no action at all. That’s a great segway into your goals and your vision and your dreams. It may not, your partner may not always understand what you’re thinking or be on board with it. That doesn’t mean you should just sit on it and not let anything happen. And I say that coming from a place of, for example, our real estate portfolio. I had a vision when we bought our first property together back in 2009, I thought it was extremely exciting. I know it’s supposed to be boring, but I was just like, thrilled with the fact that we owned a property. And that day I decided every two years we’re going to buy another property. And while I did not communicate that to you, I kept on that goal until 2016, I think it was when you came home and from work one day and you’re like, I am maxed out, no more properties, I can’t handle anymore. And I was, in my head I was like, that doesn’t fit my goals or my vision. So you left that weekend because you had to go take care of a property in another province and I did some massive googling to find out how I can help you, because you didn’t understand my vision of our real estate goal and why I want to go there.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:13] And I wasn’t a good communicator at that time. I didn’t really know how to do it effectively, and so I knew I couldn’t just convince you to take on more real estate and to do this more, the more work was going to bring. So I signed you up for a real estate investing networking group. And when you came home and I told you, you absolutely were not excited. But I was. You in, as a good, you take on things as you are pretty chill at sometimes, and you went to the first networking group meeting and from there you were so excited, like you came home, I think we even talked about this in a previous episode, how you wanted to share it with me, and I was just sleeping. But from there that changed us and we bought two more properties that next year because you saw a whole different vision of what that could look like. And that was based, you know, the quick action there was me saying, that doesn’t fit my goal. Boom, I’m signing you up. And that helped change your perspective.

 

Brian Persson: [00:05:16] Yeah. And inside of that, one of the lessons that we learned there that we maybe didn’t know back then, as you said, you weren’t the biggest communicator. But sometimes you can’t communicate inside of the relationship. Sometimes there’s literally things that the partner will not hear. And in that case, I was not hearing the fact that we needed to keep growing our real estate portfolio. All I was hearing was that tenants can be a pain, I’m I’m overworked on a lot of the management of our current portfolio, and that I don’t want the future of taking on more and having more work that I have to deal with. So, but what we’ve learned today and what we actively employ in our relationship, is to bring others in. So we bring in other people to help us communicate amongst us. So in this case, you you brought in a real estate networking group to help communicate to me the power of real estate. And it really worked because, you know, when I walked into that room and I saw that there was every walk of life inside of what it means to be a real estate investor, and all the various successes that they had, I immediately wanted some of that and some of the barriers that I had in my way, those melted away and we ended up buying two properties, like you said, in the next two years, and then a third one shortly after that. Yeah. So it really elevated our real estate game by helping others put in information into our relationship where otherwise we weren’t basically hearing what the other one was saying.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:03] Yeah. And, you know, you don’t necessarily have to bring in other people like physically, like that was physically I had you go into a different room. But I know there’s been situations where we have read different books. And you, for example, you listen to a lot of audio books and you’ll bring something home and you might tell me and I won’t listen to you or implement it, but then if you can explain it or if I will listen to that book, because you know the lessons that were learned would help me, I’ve done that. And that has really shifted also, my perspective when you introduce something to me that I maybe wasn’t open to hearing, but when I heard it by listening to the same audio you did, I was kind of like, oh, okay, right? And it just helped again, us move forward.

 

Brian Persson: [00:07:51] Yeah, absolutely. So what, another question that we love to ask inside of designing a new solution for any conflict or any situation you might find you and your relationship in, is what structures around your design will make it successful? And let’s talk about structures for a second. When we say structures, we are talking about tools. We’re talking about systems. We’re talking about partners, like we were talking about for the real estate networking group.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:22] And accountability partners.

 

Brian Persson: [00:08:23] Accountability partners. Yeah. And you really need to have those structures in place in order for any goal, any design that you’re creating inside of your life and inside of your relationship to be successful. So what are some of those structures that we like to use?

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:40] So if I go back to the garbage scenario for a minute, the structure that I suggested was for you to calendar-ize it and also put a reminder on so I didn’t have to be that one to remind you. And you did. And now just every week it pops up when it’s supposed to and we’ve never had an issue since you’ve done that, like however many years ago that was.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:04] No, no. Well, eventually it became a habit, right? Once that calendar item was in the calendar for long enough, it’s just Monday mornings this is what happens, right? But calendar-ization in itself as a structure is huge. We have a, we have a coach and a mentor who says, you know, I will show you how successful you will be by what your calendar looks like. And we review our calendars, I would guess three times a day, maybe, at least once a day in the mornings, but I would say it’s more likely three times a day, just to make sure that we know exactly what’s going on in that day, we know exactly what’s going to happen, and that we aren’t going to get caught by anything. And we also have an agreement inside of our relationship that if it’s not in the calendar, it also doesn’t exist.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:53] That is true. And that has definitely got us in some sticky situations, because there’s been times where I think we both have gone and booked something, not looked at our calendar first, and then looked at our calendar and had to rebook.

 

Brian Persson: [00:10:07] Yeah, yeah. But we stick to that agreement and it immediately becomes the other person’s responsibility to fix that situation if it was not booked in the calendar because it is a hard rule. If it’s not in the calendar, it does not exist.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:25] Yeah. And if we overbook it, that’s on us. So if I overbook it, that’s for me to fix because I should have looked at the calendar first.

 

Brian Persson: [00:10:32] Yeah. That’s one agreement that we have in our relationship. We have actually a lot of agreements in our relationship. And we’re probably going to do a future episode on agreements where we will really explore what we’re going to, how you can create agreements in your relationship and allow those agreements to really make your relationship functional and work really well.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:56] Yeah. And I think another structure that, as we’re going with the what structures do you surround yourself with, is, for example, when I signed you up for that real estate investment networking group. So it was already structured to meet once a month. And so you were now monthly going to get these other individuals who were interested in the path we wanted to go. So they helped keep you on track for your real estate portfolio, but not just to build it, which we did, but also like better ways to maintain it, better ways to find maybe tenants or different strategies on your real estate game. So just it was a structure of having that, those partners, as we say, and plus the accountability aspect because you went monthly.

 

Brian Persson: [00:11:42] Well, you don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And when I went into that room, there was so much about real estate that I never even knew you could you could do in real estate. Even simple ways like just how to book up your viewing so that it doesn’t waste a whole lot of your time. I mean, that one little thing that I learned from a particular lady, a particular real estate investor lady, probably has saved me hundreds of hours, I’m sure, over the course of years. So, yeah, having those partners, having structures and people around you, super, super important. So one of the other ways that we keep our Design, the solution for our Design successful, is various other tools. Some of these tools we’ve talked about, one of them was scheduling. We’re, as you know, we’re very, very big into scheduling. If it’s not in the calendar, it does not exist, for example. Yeah. Other ways that we can keep our Design successful is things like journaling. So measuring, journaling and measuring, whatever you need to measure in order for you to succeed inside of your structure.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:52] Yeah. So for example, measuring and logging, it gives you a history to go back on. And there are so many apps available depending on what your goals are. So I know one we use is if we’re wanting to ever say lose weight or get in better shape, we would use a fitness tracking app where it can measure what you eat, whether it be your calories depending on what you’re following, how much you work out, how much water you drink, steps you take. Like anything in the fitness realm, there are so many apps. But the great thing about the app is you can go back and see when you hit your goal, what made you successful. So later, if, say, 1, 2, 5 years from now, you want to do the same thing, it’s right there. You don’t have to recreate it, and you can just kind of keep following that path. And then it also shows you things that didn’t work because, well, if you weren’t successful, you’ll know why because you’ve tracked it. And it’s things where instead of having to guess to be like, oh, if you say you want to lose, I don’t know, 5 pounds, and you can be like, oh, how long is it going to take me? Well, you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to guess. You can go back in your app and say, okay, if I lost 5 pounds two years ago, like, how long really, on average did it take me?

 

Brian Persson: [00:14:03] Yeah. What did I do? How did it go about, the whatever it looks like, losing weight, making money, you can measure it and you can log it. Then you basically can be successful and crush that goal.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:17] Yeah. I just want to elaborate a little bit on journaling as well. And journaling can be done in many different ways. Sometimes it’s just your thoughts, your feelings. It could be your goals you’re writing out. But I know one thing that I found really interesting is I didn’t realize that, of course, until years later is one year I wrote out a bunch of symptoms I was having because I wasn’t feeling the best, and I remember going through my my drawer, beside my bed there, and I found it one day, five years later, I looked at it and I went, oh, I’m still suffering from these symptoms. But now it’s something I can evaluate over, okay, over the five years, what have I tried differently? Whether it was more sleep, less stress, better diet, more working out, time with friends, talking to the doctors, what did I use and what stayed consistent? And that is like, that’s fuel, if you will, to take back to your doctor to say, hey, this is what’s been happening for five years. This is everything I’ve tried out and done to help correct it, and it starts to illuminate things. So then you’re focusing in more and more and more on what other options you have or what maybe the problem could have been or could be.

 

Brian Persson: [00:15:28] And repeatability is really what you’re talking about. So this, so Discover, Define, Design is not a one-shot solution. And basically you can’t assume that the solution that you’re coming up with, or the solution that you’re designing, is going to be the end all and the be all. The framework we created is really designed to be repeated over and over again. So you had five years of journaling and logging. You’ve tried many, many different things, but eventually you found the solution that worked for you.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:02] Yes.

 

Brian Persson: [00:16:02] And so we both really go and encourage ourselves to like, keep finding a better solution and keep working and repeating and revising and not throwing out the, throwing it out and trying something completely new. You really have to revise that solution. I had a coach tell me once, I figured, I figured I should have got somewhere, I think it was around time management, I think. It was what I was getting coached on. And at some point I was just getting really frustrated because, you know, my time management didn’t seem to be getting to where I wanted to go.

 

Brian Persson: [00:16:42] And the coach that was helping me out, as I’m kind of ranting about how my time management is not improving, he basically asked me a couple of questions and I saw that it was improving and I’m like, yeah, yeah, maybe it is improving, but like, I should have just got there by now. And he asked me, well, do you assume that there’s a destination for your time management? And I said, well, yeah. He’s like, do you understand it’s a mountain without a top? Like you’re just going to keep getting better and better and better at time management. And I went, ohhh, okay. And that’s when I realized that every situation in your life is really a revision of the previous situation. You will never perfectly get to that situation where it is the final situation. You will always get a little bit happier in your situation, you’ll always get a little bit better in your situation, and your situation will eventually get to a point where you’re, you know, maybe it’s just not worth the effort to to improve it anymore.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:48] Yeah, absolutely. It’s a work in progress, right? Just like anything. It just, you just keep growing and learning and building on what you have, learning from the mistakes you’ve made, and just moving forward, just moving the needle one tick at a time to get to where you want to go. Some other great tools that we use or that you can explore are SMART goals.

 

Brian Persson: [00:18:11] SMART goals, yeah. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely goals. That’s what SMART stands for. Go look it up on the internet. It’s everywhere. But that’s a fantastic way to really outline your goals and get them successful.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:26] Yeah, writing down your goals is a great way to just put pen to paper on what it is you want to achieve. And as I think you mentioned earlier, like I run a vision workshop, which in and of itself can be goal-related, but it’s of course more marking out, okay, what’s the vision you want for your future, whether that be your partner, your kids, your family as a whole, where you’re living, what you’re doing for a living, whether you want to get out of the rat race, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to live somewhere warmer, there’s a fancy car you want to drive. If you put on paper what it is you want, whether you call it a vision or goals or I like to break the vision down into goals to achieve that vision, then you’re that much more likely to succeed. And then you’ll find you go back, say, a year later, and you look at your vision and you will have achieved at least part of what you put down there.

 

Brian Persson: [00:19:18] For sure. Yeah. We’ve done that many, many times. And you’re the kind of person to not get 95%. You like to get 100%.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:31] Yes.

 

Brian Persson: [00:19:32] And we have done that. We’ve literally written down ten things, completed nine of them, or like was successful on nine of those goals, and funny enough, you were frustrated about that one goal that we didn’t get. But what what happened? Right? By writing it down, if we didn’t write it down at all, we would have got, I don’t even know how many, way less than nine for sure. But by writing it down and having it in front of us and having it as a target to go towards, we got nine out of those ten goals and we were way farther ahead than if we had not written anything down and not really visioned it out.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:11] Yeah, but I mean, another great thing about writing it down is the reflection. So you go and you see how far you’ve come, because if you don’t write it down, you’re not going to remember. And you definitely won’t give yourself credit for all the successes you made along the way. So those say nine goals we achieved, if we hadn’t written it down, we just would have thought like, yeah, our year was good. But when you go back and reflect and went, wow, like I did this, that, that, I nailed that, we need to celebrate. Right? It’s just that reference and frame of mind to see that you did move forward, regardless of maybe some of the obstacles that came your way, or maybe that one goal you didn’t achieve. Appreciate the nine you did.

 

Brian Persson: [00:20:52] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is…

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:56] To recap for Design, the three takeaways we want you to run with are, first, what immediate actions are you committing to based on this Design? Second, what structures around your Design will make it successful? And third, explore the many different tools that are available to help you achieve your success.

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:18] All right, that’s it for the Design episode. Our next episode is going to be about agreements, where we are going to help you structure agreements inside of your relationship and show you why they are important. We release podcasts every two weeks, so be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app and continue the journey with us to create your life by design. Thank you for listening to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian Persson.