Introducing Life by Design

Life by Design

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Life By Design podcast. Hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson introduce you to their reason for creating this podcast by sharing their personal relationship story. Through that story, Jessilyn and Brian delve into the tools they learned to strengthen their own communication which they now want to share with you through these conversations.

Jessilyn and Brian each tell their side of their professional story, the ways they used to function in their previous jobs that contributed to burnout, disinterest, and tension between them. With striking honesty, they each reveal what part they played in adding to that tension, and why it was so difficult to communicate effectively. What they learned through career change, self-development, and disciplined communication techniques ultimately brought their relationship to a much stronger place. It gave them the tools to ensure the tension doesn’t have a chance to grow because they are too regularly sharing their thoughts and struggles with each other. This podcast is all about Jessilyn and Brian’s Discover, Define, Design Framework, and teaching us how to implement communication tools in our own lives.

—

Contact Jessilyn and Brian Persson | Discover Life By Design:

• Website: DiscoverLifeByDesign.ca
• Instagram: DiscoverLifeByDesign
• Facebook: Discover Life By Design
• Linkedin: Discover Life By Design
  
  

—

Transcript

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:11] Welcome to Life By Design podcast. We are your hosts, Brian and Jessilyn Persson. This is the first episode of our podcast, so we're going to share a little bit of our history and why we chose to do this podcast and do what we do now.

Brian Persson: [00:00:25] Mhm. Yeah. And throughout the podcast series that we're going to record here into the future, we are going to talk a lot about all the tools we picked up over the years. We're going to share a lot of our stories. We are going to give you all of the experiences that it took for us to get here today. So for this first episode, we are going to go over that history. So Jessilyn, talk a little bit about your professional couple life and why you wanted to get here to this table and help professional couples solve their problems and and resolve conflict, communicate better. Let's hear your history.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:06] Absolutely. So I am a senior project manager, a mom of two. And throughout that I found our relationship, it had its ups and downs, with us both being career-focused people, different careers, trying to manage what we have. And as time went on, I mean, the hurdles we went through and the pains and the illnesses, I would love to help other couples avoid that if possible, or the solutions and tools we have help them to get through it if they're currently in it. And that is kind of what brought me here today. How about yourself?

Brian Persson: [00:01:43] Very similar. Yeah. I worked in the tech industry for a long time, had a really good career, definitely had those golden handcuffs on me for a long time. And but eventually, you know, you just start to look at your life and you start to realize that there are things that are missing. And cracks start to show up. And recently, recently a few years ago now for us, we both really looked at those cracks and we figured out exactly how we were going to go and solve them, remake them, whatever it looked like. And so that ended up in this podcast, that landed us here today to share all those stories, how we got through all those years and solved a lot of our own problems. So that's kind of a little bit of the history. Let's talk about exactly how we shared or how we solve some of our problems in the past. So what is a typical problem that a couple like us has in their relationship?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:43] I think communication is a really big barrier just between the flows of being busy with your career and your children's needs. Sometimes we put our partners to the side or when we are together, I found one of the big things for myself is that I was not very good at expressing what I wanted and my needs, and so I would hold it within and that would cause anger. It would cause bitterness towards you as my spouse for not understanding and helping me, which I learned later was it's 100% my responsibility because you wouldn't even know, I didn't tell you. So I would say, I think as a female, asking for what I want and asking for help is one of the hardest things I had to overcome.

Brian Persson: [00:03:36] Yeah, for sure, for sure. For me it was very similar, but I felt I was probably the overexpressed type. Whereas you tried to not express, I probably overexpressed. And you know, as a guy, I kind of felt unheard. And so there are situations like that where someone is not expressing and the other person is perhaps expressing and not being heard or feeling like they're not being heard. So what, how did we solve that? How did we actually, what tool did we use to actually overcome that and make sure that we can communicate effectively together?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:11] We had to do a lot of discovery. So I know over the past few years we really dug deep into self-development and learning who we are at the core and some of the stories from our past that held us to where we were in our present and that we brought forward. And then with the self-development, you start to discover, like the areas where you maybe aren't as strong as you thought, or that could use improvement or things that were holding you back that you didn't even realize were there until we took that time to really dig deep. So I'd say definitely discover yourself first. But then we came together to start discovering like, hey, where were those holes and those cracks in our relationship that, we knew were there as cracks, but we didn't really put it together that that was part of what our relationship had become. And we knew we had to fill those and bridge those to become stronger as a couple.

Brian Persson: [00:05:13] Yeah. Over the years, within all that personal development, it almost became a rule between us that it was allowed to push the other person. And I think in a lot of relationships, to push the other person in a particular way is almost offensive in a lot of relationships. But for us, it was actually sort of the rule. We, it was you must keep moving along with me and I must keep moving along with you. And inside of that, we created actually our framework, which we'll talk about in future episodes, the Discover Define Design Framework, which is where the discover comes from. And ultimately, at the end of that, really started to design our life. So one of the big things that I think helped us, like after we kind of got all the communication and actually started listening to each other, was a tool where, a simple tool called scheduling, and we would actually schedule conversations. And it sounds so boring to schedule conversations. But as a tool for your relationship in a busy professional couple's life, you have to schedule. Like you schedule meetings, you schedule other things. You should schedule communication into your relationship.

...