It is easy to get caught up in the demands of life to find we are living our lives narrowly focusing on work or home, and we forget or neglect ourselves and our marriage. Don’t allow the daily grind to become the focus to the exclusion of your marriage.


The most important thing you can start doing is looking after yourself by focusing on these five areas. You don’t have to get it right the first time. This is part of life’s journey of learning and developing. You will get there if you are willing to invest the time and effort. Be proactive and do this for your marriage today.

    2. Work: We are the instruments of our own performance and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of balance and taking time to regularly refine and give attention to the following four areas in our lives: 1. Physical; 2. Intellectual; 3. Social and 4. Spiritual. The late Stephen Covey suggests consistent and continued refinement and attention to all four areas is crucial. 
    For marriage, it is essential that we continually review and draw our attention to these four areas to ensure an upward spiral of growth, change, and continuous improvement. The importance of renewal in our lives can not be underestimated. Learning, growing and developing new capabilities and expanding on the old ones is the process through which marital harmony is made possible.
    Attempting to balance exercise, nutrition and stress management (physical); by reading, visualising, planning and writing (Intellectual); focusing on clarifying values and our commitment, dedicating time to study, our faith and/or meditation (Spiritual); and through our service, being empathic, being synergistic and ensuring security (Social), will make a significant difference.
    Within the house, the demands can be consuming. A practical approach is to list all you weekly household tasks and allocate ownership for each. Many of our expectations about task allocation will be based on our family of origin and who undertook certain tasks in our childhood. 

Discuss the task allocation that occurred in your family of origin and understand that there are ingrained assumptions etched into out brains – who did what and when. The challenge here is to uncover those assumptions and rescript an approach that works for your marriage. Remain open to change and decide an approach that is balanced for both you and your partner.

More tips at, tune in next week…

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