Olympian Shawn Johnson East on Building a Life Beyond Medals, Body Image Battles & Overcoming Her Biggest Failure

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Let me just unload everything. New episodes every Wednesday leave those filters at the door because it's time to get real. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to RealPod. You are going to love this episode because I loved recording it. It was so inspiring. I felt motivated to better my fitness and my business and how I approach my everyday life. I felt inspired to upgrade how I approach my friendships and my marriage. Sean Johnson East is here. She is a former Olympian. She has an Olympic gold medal. And it's safe to say she's mastered a lot of things in her life. And I'm so grateful we get to hear from her today. You probably watched her compete in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where she won a gold on the beam and took home silver medals in floor, team, and all around. She got four Olympic medals sitting in her home somewhere. After she retired in 2012, she went on to compete in dancing with the stars, which she won. She built up her social media channels, starting her podcast, couple things with her former NFL star husband Andrew East and has amassed millions and millions of followers online. And excitingly, Sean and her husband, Andrew, are competing on this year's season of Fox Special Forces World's Toughest Test. I love this show so much. I have watched every season. It's a series in which household names endure the harshest, toughest challenges from the playbook of the actual US Special Forces selection process. Will she make it? We will have to tune in and find out. But I'm going to say my money is on Sean because she's such a stud. And that's premiering a Thursday, September 25th at 9/8 central on Fox to make sure you watch. In addition to that, some takeaways you can count on. Sean's going to share how she learned to love the grind so you can feel fulfilled from the process with or without the outcome. She's even going to share the moment she deems her biggest failure and the lesson it taught her that she's carried with her ever since. Sean's also going to reveal the secret body image struggles she was battling as one of the world's top gymnasts. And the three most important things that keep her marriage strong and healthy. That's coming at the end. Stay tuned. She gave so much great advice about bettering and strengthening both friendships and relationships. Thank you for tuning into RealPod, the place where you can feel seen, supported and inspired to live more authentically than ever before. Let's dive into this episode with our amazing Olympic badass guest, Sean Johnson East. Sean, welcome to RealPod. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to chat with you. It's kind of crazy. I remember watching you when I was like a child. Thank you. I'm key in the Olympics. I think it's my parents. Remember when we all watched Sean Johnson when I was a kid? She's on the pod. Oh well. I'm excited to be here. I told you. I feel like I know you because like I follow everything that you do. I feel like I've been here before. I'm glad. I was shocked looking back that you only competed in one Olympics. Do you get that a lot? Yeah. Because I literally, I'm like, no, there's no way she could be in like three. Yeah. But how amazing is it that you competed in one Olympics and impacted America so deeply? Yeah. I have no clue how that even happens. I'm very biased, but the Beijing Olympics were like the best ever. But yeah, the whole like being known thing is a pinch me. I don't get it. Yeah. It is a blessing, especially when it happened when you were so young. Now you're like, I've lived nine lives. Literally. Speaking of living nine lives, I'm sure that that came in handy on Fox Special Forces, which you were just on. Yes. Which is my dream. Like you lived my dream by being on that show. You have to go on it. Am I crazy that I think it looks fun? No, that's exactly why I signed up. Like my husband and I would pay to do something like that. Like I have flown with the Blue Angels. We work with the military very closely. We go and do like shooting competitions side by side with Green Berets. We are very intertwined with the military. So when we got this offer, I was like, yes. Absolutely. Little did I know that it is absolutely so difficult. Really way harder than you will ever even see on TV. Like there is no way for them to show everything. There's no way. How does Special Forces compare to the Olympics? The Olympics in training was very difficult, obviously. And it was over such a long period of time. But it was regimented. Like there was routine. The reason why Special Forces is actually such a mind game and so difficult is you know literally nothing. There is no schedule. There's no off time from the second you start. You are on the clock for two weeks straight. And you don't know how many challenges you're doing in a day. You don't know what kind of challenges. You don't know if you're going to be woken up at 3 a.m. or in the middle of your shower, which is like a cardboard box, by the way, which like it covers maybe your boobs and crotch. And that's about it. It's the most intense, condensed period of time I've ever experienced in my life. How special though that you got to go with Andrew? I know. Did you think that that played a big role in how you did? Yes and no. Because it's an individual competition, technically every single person could win. So there's not just like one winner. You could all finish. So you're all kind of like working together as a team, but as individuals, it made it more special. Because even when I would be like a blubbering mass, which you'll see on TV, I was hysterically falling when I eyes out. I had my husband there to like give me a hug, which is really special. But we also had this really unique and kind of uncomfortable situation where we had to watch each other struggle so bad that that was really painful. You couldn't compartmentalize as much because you had the love of your life right there literally being screamed at or getting hurt or you know, facing the biggest fear of their life. And you had to fist fight too. Shirt it. Fighting part. Every season gets me. You don't strike me as a violent gal. Let me just tell you if you've seen the picture of the blood question in my face. That is not because I was a good fighter. That's because I don't know how to fight. And I took many blows to the face because my arms were just straight down my my side. Oh my gosh. How hard was that for your husband to watch happen? Oh, he didn't mind. I didn't mind it. It's hard because we both know each other so well that we know like our strengths and our weaknesses. He didn't have an issue with like the fighting thing and I didn't have an issue watching him because we both know like we're competitors and we're fierce in that sense. I think the only thing he and I both got worried about is like, are you going to get hurt to a point to where you can't continue? Which would have been both of our like worst case scenarios. No, that would be devastating. Yeah. And that was day two that we had to fight. Oh my gosh. Going into something like this, you know it's really going to quiet everything around you and put you in front of yourself and your demons and your biggest fears and the things you've been suppressing. Did you have any perceived vulnerabilities going into it? I thought I did. And that's why I was really excited to do the show. I value and like respect the DS is what we would call them. So like the special forces guys who run it so much that I wanted them to like exploit anything. I wanted to know like what was hidden in the closet. I wanted to know if there was like a fear that was going to be crippling for me. I wanted to know all of that. And some things did come up that kind of shocked me that I was not aware of. But I will say for the most part, I was able to handle all the fears that I was really worried about and was able to talk through that with the DS and kind of control it in a way that was really beautiful. They truly want to make you better. So when you watch the show and you see them screaming at you and stuff, they treat every single person differently to a certain extent because they have us go through like psyche vows like extensively to where they know exactly how to push you to break you and they're wanting to better you by doing that. So it was it was a file. Are you able to share some of those emotional breakthroughs? There is one challenge that a majority of us do. So this season was really special in the sense of we had a fierce cast to where a lot of people hung on for a very, very long time. And there's one you've seen on all the trailers already. There's this one challenge that we do where we have to crawl. through these tunnels. And it was like my worst nightmare in my life. I actually, that would maybe be worth the rots. No rats. Okay. But like full on explosions. It was probably like two foot by two foot. And so we're in the middle of this challenge. And all of a sudden they're screaming at us to like climb into this hole. And I was like, you are out of your mind. And we're climbing through it. And it wasn't until afterwards because I wasn't with Andrew on that one. But we got like reunited. And I just started hyperventilating like legit hyperventilating panic attack couldn't breathe. Balling hysterically. But it was like after the fact, which was interesting. And I remember one of the DS saying, are you claustrophobic? And I was like, I guess so never thought I was. But that was one I really, really didn't like. Oh my gosh. And you'll see why it's so much worse than they're even showing on the trailers. There's a point. We probably crawled 400 meters. And that's through like water where you can't breathe and like all this stuff. But then you get stuck. And you have to back out of the whole thing. Do you know you're not going to die? Like did you have to sign something that was like, you could die? Because part of me when I do watch the show, I'm like, there's no way they would actually let someone on this show die. But I guess there's a chance, right? For sure. For sure. The interesting thing about it is, and you'll understand this from like athletics, but you have all of these random people from all walks of life being thrown into a very, very dangerous situation. So if you don't have people who truly pay attention to authority, and listen to like a coach's direction spot on, you have very bad things happening. Oh my gosh. At one point, we were in a helicopter that was very janky. Even the DS like recon Marines who were leading us through this were nervous. And you could tell they were nervous. And they're screaming at you in a helicopter that is so loud. You can't even hear. And they're like, I need you to lock eyes with me because if this goes down, you need to do exactly as I say. And I'm like, is this part of the show? Or I'm gonna vibe here that you are actually nervous, which is not good. You're putting very dangerous situations. And if you aren't respecting authority enough to be like, I will do every single thing you say. You, yes, you sign your life, boy. Oh my gosh. I mean, one girl was drowned. Yes. Oh my gosh. I mean, we had rescue divers. We had all the DS there. They swam in and got her, but she blacked out in the water. And you know what else I was just gonna say is a factor is how your own body reacts like your heart, your mind. There could be something that gets unearthed there that you didn't know was there. And if you decide to panic, 50 feet deep under water, strapped into an airplane and a five point harness. It's not good. Oh my gosh. Wow. So badass, though, that you like signed up for that. We'll see how it goes, but my money is on Sean and Andrew. Congratulations. Thank you. That's awesome. You should do it, though. I would love to do the higher powers that are listening. How does the word Olympian feel to you now versus when you were 16? Back when I was 16, it was everything. That's all I wanted in life. That was like the epitome of success. That's what culture told me was like the greatest thing I could ever do. And I felt that like I was really proud of myself. And I had felt like I had climbed Everest and I had succeeded. Now, I mean, I'm 17 years removed, which is wild. I have three babies, husband. It's incredible to look back on. And it's incredible that I hold that title. But in such an interesting way, it feels so small in the grand scheme of things, because I would be just as fulfilled if I didn't have that title with like my kids and my job and my husband, then I do having it. So it's, I don't know. Just a thing. What would you say to the competitor who currently feels like I need that though to enjoy my life or to have made my life worth living? So it's fun. You say this. And I were having this conversation on the airplane yesterday. A friend of ours is stuck in this world right now where he is so obsessed with needing this title of, you know, let's say it's an Olympian. It's equivalent. And he's so obsessed with the name, the successful side of it, more than the actual activity. The reason I became an Olympian was I loved gymnastics more than anything in the world. Like that's what my world revolved around. And it's because I had so much fun and I worked so hard and I had this passion that I happened to have an Olympic medal. Like hard work and stuff, you know, fed into that. But I wasn't obsessed with becoming an Olympic gold medalist. I was obsessed with gymnastics. And that was like the aftermath of it. And I feel like to the competitors out there, if you're more obsessed with the outcome than you are the actual work, it's not going to work because you're going to get there and you're probably going to get a title and you're going to feel like is this what I was working for? Whereas if you can't learn to love the work of it, then you're going to be chasing titles your entire life because you're going to feel like if only I have the next title, I'm going to feel fulfilled. And it just doesn't work that way. I mean, we all get caught up in it, right? So I think it's like a constant battle every day. The culture and society tells us to strive for success and for titles and for all these things. So every day my husband and I will get caught up in an opportunity that sent our way and we're like, oh, that would look really good for like our resume or whatever. But it's having this like reflection on a daily basis of what do we value? What's important to us? What's going to make us feel more fulfilled? What's going to help our family and our children? And so we choose wrong sometimes. But when we choose right and we do things based off of like what we actually believe in, it just ends up working out better. When it comes to loving the process, how do you tap into that? I actually think special forces is a great example because you don't win a prize, you don't win a medal or money. You win nothing. You literally win nothing. It's just I'm here because I want to grind. Yeah. Obviously you went through that getting to where you did at the Olympic level. What does that mentally look like for you? Great question. I think going back to gymnastics, I was a cripplingly shy kid my whole life, like crippling. And I loved practice a hundred times more than competing, putting me on a stage in front of people to be judged was never what I loved. And that's not why I did it. I loved going into the gym, trying to make myself better, falling on my face 5,000 times and then succeeding at something for the first time and feeling like I was literally a superhuman. I love that. I love working on myself over and over and over and over again and knowing at the end of the day that I worked really hard and I got a little bit better. To me, that feels better than any metal because a metal is subjective. I even say like an Olympic gold medal is absolutely incredible but at the end of the day you have judges who have opinions that say today I think you are better than the other person whereas like I can actually tell you in practice. This was better than X, Y and Z or whatever. So like loving the grind I think is a choice and you can love the performance as well like the titles and the success of it but if you can't learn to love monotony then I feel like you're just going to be aimlessly lost in life trying to find the next like adrenaline spike forever. It's like trying to find the honeymoon phase for in a marriage you know for your whole life. It's not going to be there. It's almost like because I can why would I not to my full potential today because like life is so precious and because you're never promised tomorrow, you know like I mean I'm not Sean Johnson but I went to work at this morning I woke up at 60 and I was just like God do I really want to do this now but I'm going to do it because I have the time I want my body to move in this way and I don't want to have regrets. You know what I mean? It's not something that's going to motivate you just because you can do it but then it takes like that next level of discipline. It's interesting because like in marriage like you're married you get this it's like I want to be married if that's like a goal you have then you got to date someone and if you're not willing to date someone you're probably not going to get married. It's like if you aren't willing to put in the work then whatever goal is you have you're never going to attain and if you can't learn to love the process then there's really not much you can accomplish. This episode of RealPod is sponsored by BetterHelp. We turned to some funny places for support. But not everyone is a therapist, you know, not everyone is the one. So you can find your right match with BetterHelp. It's fun to turn to your barista or your hairdresser or a random stranger in the bathroom for life advice. 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This deal is only available through this link. You must go to DRINKElementE.com/RealPod and honestly talking about it is making me want it so bad. I'm going to fill up my water bottle. I think I'm going to go raspberry today with some crushed ice. You do the same. Head to drinkelement.com/RealPod. Was there a specific disappointment or failure in your career that ended up teaching you more than the success ever what of? Yeah. I mean, that's gymnastics. I fell flat on my face in front of the world many, many, many times. I would say two things come to mind. One, in practice, in gymnastics. I think one of my favorite things about the sport is it's so incredibly humbling. You literally fall on your face or like split a beam or fall 12 feet from a bar to your stomach or like whatever hundreds of times before you ever succeed. That's literally the foundation of gymnastics. I think it's so humbling in the sense of it encourages failure. I remember my coach used to celebrate when we would fall and when we would try new things because it's only if you do that while you ever learn a new skill. I thought that was the most beautiful thing I was ever taught in life is if you get it on the first try, it was way too easy or too small of a dream for you anyways. So if we were trying new skills in gymnastics, if I tried it and it was easy, my coach would be like, oh, we didn't shoot high enough, like we need to try a harder skill. And so it was almost like the more I failed, the more he knew we were going in the right direction. Something that's definitely on a bigger scale, my very first world championships. I was number one in the country on the balance beam. I was expected to just walk away with that gold medal at worlds and I knew it and I let that seed be planted in my mind that like this is mine. It was easy for me. I just had to go do it in whatever and I felt three times which in the grand scheme of things, falling once for me on a world platform at that level was very rare. In the fact that I felt three times in the same competitive performance was absolutely humiliating and I felt on things that were easy, but I got a big hit and I instead of working for it and being humbled and keeping myself in the right place, I remember thinking like this will never happen again. I will never let myself think too highly of myself or expect too much because it'll end in failure. And what a powerful lesson to learn that was that before the Beijing Olympics, right before yeah, exactly right and it's like if you didn't get the gold at worlds, who knows if you would have gotten a gold at the Olympics. Absolutely. Do you think you honestly wouldn't have if that didn't humble you? I mean, it set me straight. I don't know, but it was a really powerful lesson. It was the first time I ever cried in a competition. I remember my coach just like the look of to a certain extent disappointment of like I could see your head getting big. I tried to get you back, you know, on straight line, but you let it get too much. Almost like an I told you so a moment and I think had I not learned that my competitive career would have looked different. Yeah. That's such a powerful story. We never know what we're being set up to learn or how it's going to position us for the future. Do you feel like you call on some of those moments in your present day life when something goes wrong and not the way you wanted a million times a day? I think my husband is probably exhausted by how many like gymnastics life lessons I throw at him in a weekly basis, but I truly believe gymnastics in my coach taught me everything I use in today's life. Like everything how I parent with failure, I was so blessed to have such a phenomenal coach who is so wise. He taught me from day one. It was never about medals. It was never about scores. It's about having fun and trying to like better myself a little bit more each day. He gave me the gift of being a kid and being able to play instead of being, you know, a grown up kid adult that had to work and yeah, I look back on every lesson I've learned in gymnastics literally every day. Wow. I know you've talked in the past a little bit about some body image struggles. I struggled with a binge eating disorder when I was playing college volleyball and that whole thing. And I'm wondering how much of being on such a public stage affected you or how much of it was just internalized, maybe self-worth issues. All of it. I mean, from every angle. I think for me, some of the body image issues started with basic physics and a lack of guidance at a very young age with like a professional dietician or nutritionist. I became obsessed with gymnastics. I became obsessed with like getting better and doing better. And I knew on a bad day, if I walked in the gym and I tried to flip my body and I felt heavy in my mind two plus two equals four. It was kind of like, I need to be lighter. How do I get lighter? I eat less. And that was not an eating disorder out of vanity. That was me as a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old trying to figure out how to make my gymnastics easier, which was the first tip of the iceberg. Then you add into it. I started competing on a world stage. I at the time in my generation of gymnastics, I looked very different. I was a different style of gymnasts than people had really seen before. I was muscular. I was not the lean nausea that people were used to seeing. And because it's a subjective sport, I had a lot of judges who didn't like that. And I would have judges and people within the industry pull me aside and say, if only you looked a little different and looked more like nausea, we'll give you higher scores. And so mix physics with a lack of guidance with the subjectivity. In my mind, it was this perfect concoction to just take a teenage girl's mind and say, it would be better if I looked different. And I didn't anything and everything I could to do that for a very long time. Did it ever get to a point where it was super serious and you had to like get back on track and really heal your relationship with food in your body? Oh yeah, it got very bad. I was doing everything. I took a fedron. I was overdosing on Adderall. I had doctors who were very unhealthy. Doing anything and everything they could to give me all the energy. Without any food, I had a horrific self-worth. I couldn't look myself in a mirror. It was really bad for a while. And I was really lucky. I don't know if it came from gymnastics. I don't know if it just [BLANK_AUDIO] and lately or from the beautiful community of like my parents and my coach, but I woke up one day and said I don't want to feel like this anymore. And so I took it upon myself to fix myself and hired the world's most amazing dietician and psychiatrist who I worked with for 10 years who truly healed me. I think I started working with her when I was 18. That was the worst of it all the way up until I had my first kid. And I remember calling her when I was pregnant and I hadn't talked to her in a while. It would be like jumping back in and I said I don't even know how to explain this, but for the first time in my life, I'm afraid that I'm not eating too much, whereas my whole life I was obsessed with eating less. And for the first time when I was pregnant, it was this fear of like I need to be eating more. I need to make sure that like I'm nourishing my body. And it was like a switch flipped. And it was no longer about me as about my baby. And I just remember my dietician started crying on the phone. And she's like, if only you could have heard this 10 years ago. And you would know that like there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but it yeah, she saved me. I've been hearing more and more moms talking about how getting pregnant actually healed their body image issues. Yeah. I feel like it's more popular to hear the stories of women who are resenting the pregnancy body. But I think it's beautiful to think about how you don't have to think of it. It's just this image or this ornament or this material thing. It's actually a vessel that's creating life. Yes. I don't want to put the pressure on like being pregnant in my children to have healed me fully because I did put in so much work to get there. But there was something about getting pregnant to where it was no longer about me. It was not about how I looked in a mirror. It's not how I felt. It was like, it is now my job to take care of my body in the best way possible because it's taking care of my baby. And it's almost like it made everything make sense for the first time of like how you're actually supposed to treat your body. And it made it easy. And it was the most refreshing feeling in the entire world. How does it make you feel seeing the bodies of the gymnast today that are pleased and celebrated having had that experience? So proud. I mean, I don't want to say like I was any part of that. But I love to see the new direction that's going because I think as we're seeing in so many different industries, we're just debunking all these old stereotypes and all these like false misconceptions of like you have to look a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain person in order to succeed. And I love seeing that be proved wrong over and over again. And girls have a better experience maybe than I did. It makes me hopeful, especially now being a mother. It makes me look at those girls almost like my kids and be like, I'm happy you're not going through exactly what I went through. You probably still are in some capacity because we live in today's world, but it makes me happy. Yeah. Yeah. For the female athletes up today who are hyper consumed with their image, what would your advice be to them? If you're an athlete, the last thing you should be consumed by is your image. You should be consumed by your performance. And whatever the byproduct is if you're trying to optimize your body for your specific performance, whatever that ends up looking like is perfection. If that makes sense. I feel like for me, I got caught up competing in the opposite process where I was obsessed with how I looked. And because of that, I think I sacrificed some of my potential in optimizing my athletic performance. Because I just wasn't treating my body properly. And I feel like with athletes these days, be obsessed with like the performance and getting your body to do the best it possibly can. And whatever it ends up looking like is how it's supposed to look like. I love that so much. When you retired from gymnastics, what was the hardest part about understanding your new identity as Sean Johnson, the person and not Sean Johnson, the Olympic gymnast, everything? I knew nothing about Sean Johnson the person when I retired. I didn't even know it existed. I felt like to become an Olympic athlete for me, I had to be in a very unhealthy way obsessive about gymnastics. It was everything I was, how I ate, who I spoke to, who I hung out with, what my schedule looked like. It all revolved around my sport. And so when I took that sport away by retiring, I literally didn't know how to be a human being. And so it was a massive life identity crisis. And it took a long time to rebuild. Because I also had the entire world expecting an Olympic gold medal style life and any new thing that I did. And that's impossible to obtain. So I was paralyzed by this fear of like, I can't even go try something new because if I'm bad at it, people will see me as an Olympic gold medal failure instead of like just a success in life. Yeah, it was really, really hard. And you didn't have a normal high school experience or any of that to kind of jump back into, right? So I did. I went to public high school, my whole, you know, high school career. I tried to go back to high school after the Olympics and wasn't able to. It was too much of a disruption for the school. Really? Yeah. Because you were such a little celebrity, they were like, you can't be here. Yeah, kind of. That's so brutal. It was brutal. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And you're like, I just, I just did a thing. I'm sorry you guys all watching cared so much. I just want to go back to math class. Yes. I almost more than gymnastics. I was obsessed with education. I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon my whole life. And so school was really important to me. So when my schooling got derailed, I was devastated. Did you have to become homeschooled? Yeah. I did like a private tutoring. I think it would be considered homeschool now, but like I would go to this little place and sit in the pod with a person for eight hours a day till I finished high school. So then you're finishing school on your own. And then what was next? And how were you figuring out what to do? And did you ever think, oh, nothing's ever going to be as glamorous or intense as what I just accomplished? I never thought that. I was very naive in the sense of, again, going back to the passion of gymnastics. I went to the biggest competition of my life to have fun and to do well. And then I was going to go back to finish high school. I was going to go off to college. I was going to become the surgeon. And that made sense to me. Like that's exactly how my life was going to go. And I think with every passing week and month, where it wasn't doing that, because first, I couldn't go back to high school. And then I had to get tutored. And then I couldn't walk through graduation. And it was all of these things. My life just started looking very different. And it was making sense to everybody but me. I just kind of got put on this roller coaster of, you know, speaking opportunities and reality TV shows. And it just kept going. And all of a sudden, I found myself on a roller coaster that looked wildly different than anything I had ever prepared for. Found myself deferring college seven years before I ever started. And was not becoming an orthopedic surgeon then. It was a wild ride. How did you navigate that? A lot of people nowadays are feeling really torn between what they thought they wanted to do versus how their life is shaping out. And you want to know, right? Like, this is my plan. And this is where I'm going to be in five, 10 years. But you can't always know. So what would your advice be to someone who's feeling lost? And like, should I just keep riding the wave? Or should I buckle down and create my game plan? I would say hold it loosely. Reflection is always great. But for me, I just kept asking myself like, I had the choice. And I had the option at any given point in time to quit and just go to college. But every time I was faced with that choice, it was kind of like, well, this isn't what I pictured, but I don't hate it. And I am having fun. And this looks wildly different than anything I have ever prepared for. But I'm having these once in a lifetime opportunities. And I'm meeting great people and I'm learning. I still feel like I have an entire business degree without ever going to college because I was negotiating contracts starting from the age of 15. It was just, I think constantly asking yourself like, you can redo anything, which my husband and I have done many times. We have literally laid it all out on paper and said, I actually don't like it. Not happy. I don't feel fulfilled. I want to wipe it clean and start over. And can you give an example like with certain ways your businesses growing? I would say early on in our relationship, Andrew was bouncing around the NFL. I was still dragging out this like post Olympic career. I had been speaking colleges and corporations for a very long time. And I was kind of done with that. And when we wrote it all out on paper, it's kind of like, we don't like any of it. It's amazing. Great opportunities, but we're done with it. And so we started over. We started YouTube. My husband had this wild idea. It was not my idea. So my husband's idea. I thought he was certifiably crazy. But we dove into this new world of social media just kind of thinking like it sounds kind of interesting and fun. And we want to learn it. And it kind of took off. And we had a blast and we felt like we were learning something new and I think that's maybe a small one but for us we have no problem starting over because for us fulfillment and like joy and happiness in our career is more important than anything and I feel like if you are absolutely miserable doing what you're doing you're not doing the right thing. If you've heard me talk about twins before you know I'm a huge fan and if you haven't yet gone to quince.com/reelpod what are you waiting for truly. Fall is upon us you might be being influenced to get some new false sweaters fall cardigan some cashmere please look no further than quince.com/reelpod first because you will be blown away at their timeless luxury hundreds of styles for a banging price by partnering with ethical top tier factories and cutting out the middle man. Quince is able to deliver luxury quality pieces at half the price of similar brands. 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And we did with our first kid and our second kid and we loved it. We had a wonderful balance. I am a firm believer with an hour family that it's a blessing. I'm a better parent when I work than I am a stay-at-home mom. That's just what works in our dynamic. So we found ways to do that successfully. And it was always my husband and I do these check-ins every Sunday night. So even with kids we'll put the kids down. We'll meet at the dining room table and we'll have check-ins. We'll be like how did the scales feel this week? Do we feel like we had enough time with our kids enough time as a family? Do we feel fulfilled in work? What do the scales look like? And every single week we'll teeter them back and forth of like I need to work a little bit more this week or I needed to take it back but it's constantly refining and we did that for our first two kids. And then third kid came around and something switched in me where I said I am kind of burnt out with work and I want to take a huge step back and I want to spend 75% of the week with just the kids. And so we did that. And then it's just kind of like balancing back and forth but I would say we had a lot of friends put the fear of God in us when we started talking about kids and they said your life will never look the same. You'll lose all your social life. You'll lose your career. You know it will never be the same. And it's a lot of crap. Your life can be whatever you want to make it. And your kids will thrive and you'll thrive and yeah there's too much fear mongering around that. There really is. Gonna have to clip this part and show this to my husband. He literally is like my life will never be the same. I'm like but what if it's a good thing? It'll never be the same in a good way. My husband is finishing his dissertation to get his PhD in psychology right now and his dissertation is on basically in the work world parents become more efficient and are actually more successful than entrepreneurs who don't have kids because your priorities as soon as you have a kid just become super straight. Yeah. You know exactly what's important to you and I will say that happened to us when we had our first kid. It's like all the noise and clutter just kind of went away and I was like this is really important to me. I can tell you what I don't enjoy doing, what I do enjoy doing and it almost became simpler because I could just say no to anything I didn't care about. You and Andrew have such a beautiful relationship that seems so strong and healthy and all the best ways. What would you say are the three most important things that make your marriage thrive? We never stop dating each other and I mean that in the sense of like complacency and marriage is really scary and so when you date each other before you get married you're always courting each other. You're always trying to impress each other and do the next cute thing. So every single week we have a standing date night whether we like each other or not we are going and it really has changed our marriage because life gets busy, work gets busy, kids get busy and it's really easy to just become cohabitants of the same house and not husband and wife and so we go on a date night every single week. I will say our Sunday night debriefs are really important to us. It's a safe space for us to say this bothered me this week. I need more time doing this. I'm not feeling love or whatever. Do you do this with pieces of paper? Is it just a conversation and is it a certain time every Sunday at 9 o'clock? Yeah and you go do go to the same spot we sit on the couch or we go to the dining room table. Yeah we call it bevtime which is like grab a glass of water, grab a croix, whatever we're going to sit down and have a conversation, go over our schedules, go over how the week felt and we've done it so often that it's routine to us but it is a let's debrief this week and we all know that things change like emotional needs change daily and a Sunday night can look like for us. I'll say to Andrew I felt a little lonely this week. I feel like this next week I need to schedule a girls night or I need a little more time to work out this week. How can you support me in that or vice versa? And we will literally lay out the week to like fill each other's cups full of like the time and like the things they need to be the best person and it just it works out better and it helps eliminate the possibility of just building resentment and and unsaid things. The whole month you haven't done this it's like let's avoid that completely by having a weekly check in so that the bubble can never get so big it needs to burst. Truly and I think both my husband and I have this fear that the bubble will burst and so we're super proactive about it. We are over communicators were over analytical thinkers. My husband has like data points on our marriage. It sounds not romantic but it's this whole idea like how can we take our athletic careers and put it into our marriage and optimize our marriage to make sure that we are each other's best friends for life and we don't build resentment and we're constantly like serving each other the best we can. I love that. Okay so one, two, do you have a third laugh together be stupid and silly and laugh about things. Don't take it too seriously. It's so true. Max brings that a lot into our marriage because I can definitely get more serious. Long story short our whole bed frame is broken so it's like on the floor. Literally our mattress is like an inch off the ground and of course I'm like oh my gosh this is so weird now I gotta do this. Max comes in and he goes a low rider. I'm like a low rider and the asserts playing that low rider so he's like I never want to change the low rider and I'm laughing like who it was just so awesome that he's made like what I think is as a frustration of our week, now a funny bit. - But truly, if you take things too seriously, life just kind of gets dull and you gotta be able to laugh it off. What's your outlook on friendships and relationships? You mentioned a girl's night. You seem obviously just so cool and your time obviously is very valuable. - My husband and I are pretty social. My husband is like the golden retriever who can make a friend anywhere he goes. If he even walks down the sidewalk, he's gonna make a friend to Joe on the side of the road. For me, I'm very introverted. I get very shy. I have a hard time making new friends, but I love hosting. I love being around people. I love pouring into people. And so our weeks look very full. We're both a part of like a women's group and a men's group. So I have like my close five girls. - Like a friend group or like a church group or like a special club. We consider it a Bible study, but it's all of those mixed in one because adulthood gets really sticky and yucky. And if you can't have those friends to really share your skeletons in the closet with, then you're gonna build resentment in life and you're gonna have things burst and not have an outlet to share it with. - A special for men. - A group of men. That does not happen. - Yeah, my husband is a huge advocate for like the men's generation right now and like really pouring into them because I think it is very rare. It's very, very common in Nashville, men's groups. Like that. I think my husband's a part of three different groups that are very, very intentional. - And so that inspired you all the wives I'm guessing to get together and have a women's group. - Yes, and we wanted to take it a little bit deeper. I feel like girls will get together for like book clubs or a wine night or whatever. And we wanted to do that, but we wanted to like pour into each other and say, tell me the yucky part of your life right now so I can be helping you with that. - Oh my gosh, I love that so much. - That's so beautiful. But then, so the social side on top of that, we host people at our house four times a week, every week. We do pasta night on Sunday and it's open door policy of like any friend who wants to come. They all know pasta night is on Sunday. So we'll probably cook for 20 people every Sunday. We do burger nights on Saturday, because it's football season now. So grilling and burgers in the pool will do a couple for like cards and wine after the kids go down one night of the week and then our date night will do us in like a double day. - Oh my gosh, that is impressive. I don't even have kids and I'm like, I need three nights a week laying down talking to nobody. (laughs) It is a lot, but I will say it's really hard to make friends as an adult. - No it is. - And people don't try. - But also it's like no one's going to do it. And I'm sitting here very inspired by the way that you guys have just taken action. I love this pasta night's on Sunday. And I could see us wanting to do something like that when we have maybe a bigger space and we can do that because why not? And then it helps you have deep in your relationships with people because getting close with someone is by accumulating more lived experience together. I will say too, you don't need a bigger space. So don't put that out there. - I appreciate it. - Cops, chaps, your house is studying your plenty of space. The thing that my husband I went back and forth on this 'cause he's the really, really social one. And I kept saying like I felt lonely but I didn't know how to make friends because I am so introverted. And so it was just compromised to where we said, okay, I feel so happy hosting if I can stay in my house. And I can communicate with people if I can be washing dishes as they're doing it. It's probably something I should work on in therapy. But it just became this thing of like great. We can have people over that we do have rules when it comes to like pasta night and burger night and our friends are very used to it. But it's like our house is your house. Everyone's gonna clean. Everyone's gonna help cook. We're going to live together. And it's not going to be like this like your perfect thing. Right, that's really helpful for me to hear because I did grow up with a mom who's an incredible host, but she took it all on herself. Don't get up, don't grab that. I'm gonna do this for you. But to your point, that's not sustainable. And so it's like if you have people over and they know you're not gonna be weighted on, then you don't have like the pre-exity or you don't feel drained. - We read in a book somewhere I can't remember what it was. It was this idea of like it is beautiful to completely host everyone's in a while. We're like, don't get up. I'm going to serve you. I'm going to do everything and I love doing that. But to actually relate to someone, you should try to bring them into your home and put them on, I don't wanna say your level, but like make your home their home. Where it's like you're gonna help us load the dishes. You're gonna help us clean up dinner. Please, please bring something. And when everybody kind of has a hand into it, it becomes more relatable and more community-like to where you can have deeper conversations and people don't feel like they're being hosted as many. - I love that so much and this may sound elementary, but how did you establish those rules? Like in the first text to kick off pasta Sundays, because that is a little bit uncomfortable, right? - It has evolved over time. It's not like we came up with all of this. This has just kind of been learned. - I'm so type A. I'm like, do you have a document I can send to my friends? - I actually do. My husband has written this down, so he'll text it to you. - Perfect. - The way it had started was it was right up for COVID. We felt like we had been alienated from all of our friends and we needed to rebuild the community. So we started grilling night, whatever, where people were gonna come over every, I don't remember when it was Friday and we were gonna grill. But the rules that we set in place were the guys grill, the girls will clean up. Like the guys will cook and the girls will clean. And then that's where foundationally we started. And something happened where another night of the week, people wanted to come over and we're like, fine. And we're just gonna reverse it. Us girls are going to cook and guys are gonna clean. And it just kind of started marking this expectation of everyone has a hand. - Right, it's not a Sean and Andrew thing, it's a group thing. - It's always just kind of a revolving, how can I contribute? And I think the hard part for me was releasing this idea of like, oh no, no, no, I got it to be the opposite where it's like, thank you so much. - I love that so much. - You inspired me. - I'm gonna need to do it inside of your picture. - You gotta do it. - Any favorite books you've read, you have such a great disposition. I feel like you're just on top of your shit. It's giving like, call me in a crisis and I'll give the best of my energy. So I'm wondering if there are some things that you can give our listeners today who might wanna be more like you and they wanna read that book that changed your life or you do a certain journaling every morning. What are some of those routines that keep you grounded and like yourself? - Let me just start by saying this is not who I am. I'm married the man who made me this. Like I said, he has data on our marriage. Habits of the household change for life. It's a book. It is phenomenal. We can feel so chaotic in life where it's like, I don't know how to make that change. I don't even know how to start dinner. I don't know how to start a community pause tonight. It simplifies it and dums it down to be like, oh, well that feels easy. It truly changed for life. So I would say Habits of the household is phenomenal book and then I think it's called the five minute journal. I adore that book. I feel like that really changed me. Every single day you write in one page, it takes literally, it takes a lot less than five minutes. But it's like three things you're grateful for, three things that can make your day go really well. And then I think at the end of the day, you write three favorite things that happened that day. And I love it because it really kind of sets your perspective for the day to be positive and not negative. - I love that. - A little easter egg for everyone listening, but there might be something coming that will help them with this. They're working on, I'm getting it to send it to you. - You're gonna love it. - I love it. - Well, Sean, thank you so much. - Thank you. - This was so fun. I loved getting super intense and deep. And then I love talking about life and marriage and friendship. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on, rooting for you. - Thank you. - So excited to watch. - Thank you. - And then we'll have to like regroup via in the DMs when I find out everything that happened with you. - Absolutely. I'm excited for you to watch. - Yay, thank you. - Thank you. - This was awesome. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for listening to this episode of RealPod. If this hit home or helped you in some way, send it to a friend, a teammate, Rumi. Share the love, share the realness. New episodes of RealPod come out every single Wednesday. So make sure you are subscribed to this podcast. So you never miss an episode. To leave a rating or a review of the show, head to iTunes and let me know what you think. I love hearing from you. Not to mention you can stay connected with RealPod throughout the week, seeing behind the scenes info and sneak previews of upcoming guests by following the @RealPod account on Instagram. All information about today's show and guests will be linked in the description of this episode. Thanks again for listening. I love you guys so so much. Let's go dominate the day and as always, keep it real. (upbeat music) Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode. Hi guys, it's Jordyn from the Balanced Bond Solon Fire Podcast. On my show, we go deep on all things, astrology, awakening, motherhood, channeling, healing, and so much more. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and the healing journey I embarked on at that time set me on the path to radical awakening. Let's just say I had no choice but to change my energy and that opened me up to the most beautiful healing of my life. On my show, you can expect to feel like you're sitting in my living room chatting with old friends. Tune in every Wednesday to connect and hang on the balance bond full on fire.