Father of 17 Reveals His Secret to a Happy Family | Conor Gallagher #186

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Conor Gallagher is a successful businessman, author, and father of 17 children. But despite his success at work, he admits that for years, he was giving his best to his business while his family got the worst version of him.

That realization led him to develop Well-Ordered Family, a system that applies proven business principles to family life. In this episode, Conor reveals how he manages his large family, reduces chaos, and creates a more peaceful, joyful home using practical tools that any family can adopt.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Conor manages a household with 17 children

• Why he believes families should operate more like businesses

• The simple systems that reduce stress, chaos, and conflict at home

• Why busyness might be quietly destroying your family

• How to build a healthy family, even if you grew up in a broken one

If you come from a broken or dysfunctional family and wonder whether you could ever build a happy, healthy family of your own, this episode is for you.

Resources mentioned:

• Conor's books, videos, and family resources: https://wellorderedfamily.com

• Join Restored's healing program: https://restoredministry.com/program

• Get It's Not Your Fault or download free chapters: https://restoredministry.com/books

Enjoy the show?

To be notified when new episodes go live, subscribe below.

As a bonus, you'll receive the first chapters from our book, It's Not Your Fault: A Practical Guide to Navigating the Pain and Problems from Your Parents' Divorce.

TRANSCRIPT

Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!

Joey (00:00)

Connor, welcome to the show, man. Great to have one of the things that I experience coming from a broken family and a lot of the young people that we work with from broken families feel is that they doubt their ability, their capability to build a healthy marriage and family one day. They did not see that growing up. They saw the opposite. They saw a really chaotic, dysfunctional family. And so the idea of building a functional one can be pretty foreign, pretty intimidating. And so by the end of this episode, my hope is that they walk away with hope.

that they can go on and build that one day and perhaps even learn from us, from you in particular, some of the things they might do to go about building that. And even by the way, in cases where maybe the marriage and family are some years away, because we have kind of a mix of audience and people who are in it right now and who want to be one day. But I want to start with the the problem. What does the opposite of a well ordered family look and feel like? And why would you say the majority of families are are like that?

Conor Gallagher (00:54)

Yeah, I think the opposite of Weller family is pretty much most families you come in contact with in today's world. I mean, I I yeah, we we have a pandemic of dysfunction. I mean, individuals are dysfunction, of course. So you take two dysfunctional people and you put them together and they build a dysfunctional family. I mean, it's just hard. And I'm not casting moral aspersions onto them because I think so many people we're the like we're we're the frogs in the boiling water, but this modern world

With the technology, with the busyness, with all of these things has been, I think, demonically strategi strategized to disrupt the family. Okay. I mean, I really, I really think that. I think all the powers of darkness have gotten together in a conference room and said, How do we screw up families long term? You know? And I that's they're they're damn good strategists, you know. So we have to be strategic in response, you know. And I also don't think that you can just pray rosaries and get out of it.

I think I think you have to work like everything depends on you and pray like everything depends on God, right? So but I think here's the typical picture to answer your question. Mom and dad, three or four kids. All the kids play three or four sports, which I love sports, but that means no family dinners. That means they're constantly on the move. That means weekends are on the soccer field, most evenings are on the soccer field, baseball field. That means the kids grow up thinking that kind of the world rotates around them.

That also means modern dads tend to think that like they have to be at everything. Mom feels like she has to be everything. Mom has to work out and be in shape and be lean. She also has to volunteer everywhere. She has to raise all these kids. She has to sit on committees. Now usually they have part-time jobs or full-time jobs at home working remote. And dad usually becomes kind of a wimpy loser because he gets lost in this whole mix.

It also means that mom and dad dysfunction means mom and dad are in debt up to their eyeballs. They live paycheck to paycheck. And they never get out of that rut. And the way they decompress is they binge watch Netflix. They doom scroll on YouTube for an hour a night. They eat like crap. Dad usually after mom goes to bed. And it's like his little way he's, you know, sneaks the peanut butter when mom goes to sleep. dad usually has a hidden addiction to porn.

Or at least a proclivity to it because the marital relationship is not strong. I think mom often, because of her stress level, weaponizes sex with her husband. So that kind of contributes to dad seeking it elsewhere. And by the time the kids reach teenage years, they are so stressed out because mom and dad have not had a healthy relationship. They have not had a healthy, balanced lifestyle that the kids start, you know, replicating mom and dad's behavior very, very quickly.

That's environmental, obviously, but there's a spiritual element to it, Joey, of generational sin. And, you know, no, it's not like the old testament Jews thought where if the guy's paralyzed and said, Well, that was because of dad's sin. But generational sin is a reality and we do have to spiritually kind of break these spiritual binds that we have from our our father's sins, our grandfather's sins, et cetera.

And there's a real there's a real way to do that. Tan publishes a book. I'm wondering if it's sitting on my desk right now, but it's called Generational Sin. and the biblical explanation of that. So we now are in, why am I mentioning that? We're in multiple generations of really since like baby boomer generation, you know. So we're like three or four generations removed from the baby boomers, where we've had this technological, digital, very fast-paced, very rich, very debt.

oriented family life and all of that has led to dysfunction. And so I just gave I just rattled off Joey like what does a dysfunctional family look like? And I think I described kind of the average family. I mean it's kind of sad to say. And I said some strong things in that. But that's the that's the world I see when I kind of look around, even with the people going to church and going to mass or whatever. I mean, I see those people kind of living those hidden lives. So that, you know

That inspired me and my battling my own demons, me dealing with, you know, I got seventeen kids now, four grandkids. So, you know, as the family was getting more and more complicated, I'm sitting here saying, Wait, if I'm this stressed out at five, six, seven, eight kids, what the hell am I gonna do if I keep having more? Like I can barely handle it now. Like I named my fifth kid Jude. His name was Jude because Jude is the patron saint of impossible tasks. And I said, There's just no way my wife and I, Ashley and and me could could possibly

successfully raise five kids. It was just a number that was just we weren't good enough to do. So that's why I named him Jude. It was an impossible task. So over time we started building more function, but you have to look at all of those tangible environmental things I just explained. And everything from food, diet, digital activities. I was on another guy's podcast and we were talking about family and he said he's a great man.

And he's got four kids. And he said, My wife and I looked at our calendars last night and we were trying to get a date night. And we realized there was not an available night for us to go on a date for 34 days from now. I

Joey (06:19)

Thirty four days.

Conor Gallagher (06:21)

looked at him and I said, That is your decision. Stop blaming little league coach. Stop blaming the volleyball coach. Stop blaming the algebra teacher. Stop blaming the church committee head that called a meeting that you have to go to. Stop blaming work.

This is you. You have filled this calendar up. You have done this. You and your wife did this. It's not the world's fault. You're not a victim. You're not a victim. You chose to live this, and you can choose not to live this. So, yeah, certain things have to go, certain sacrifices had to be made. But you're so busy being so good that you can't go out to dinner with your wife? Let's stop and think about that, right? So, all of that, Joey, is the tangible environmental stuff. Okay, that's the natural realm.

Well, the natural and supernatural realm work together. I mentioned generational sin. It's a real thing. And we have to intentionally pray to like cut loose from any generational sins of our fathers, our forefathers. That's another topic. But here's the other more practical, simple thing that I want to emphasize on the supernatural level that must accompany the natural level. We can talk natural and like how to organize your day. All of that is for naught.

If you continue to fall into the sin of the age, and most people would say the sin of the age is lust, okay, with all the craziness going around. No, it's not. The sin of the age is sloth. That is sloth. Today, people are so exhausted, they are so exhausted doing everything I just mentioned that they do not have the spiritual energy to pray. They have lost that energy. Sloth is being, Aquinas says it's sluggishness towards spiritual goods.

So when the dad on Sunday wants to just watch golf, okay, and he says, I gotta go to Mass, gotta go to church today, pray a family rosary, you know, I just want to watch Seinfeld reruns, whatever. That's sloth. We have excitement about all of these other things. It might even be excitement to go to the baseball field with the little league kid so that we don't have to be around our wife, who we're bickering with, but we have no spiritual energy to swing by church to

pray with our kids at night, to pray with our spouse, to read scripture. We have no spiritual energy to wake up early and pray. We might have it to wake up and go to the gym so we look good at the beach or so mom looks good in her yoga pants, but we don't have the spiritual energy to do what pleases God the most. That is sloth. It's the secret sin. All of their seven deadly sins. That's one of them. But I can I I like to look at people and say, I know your secret sin.

We all have a secret sin. I know, Joey. I know your secret sin. I know your wife's secret sin. It's sloth. Why? Because it's the sin that's a secret. That's why. Like it's it is the secret, right? So all the other things, yeah, we might have secret pride or lust or anger, whatever, but the nature of sloth is the secret. Because in today's world, we have built up so much busyness that sloth slips in. It's like, it's like the the Greek warriors and the Trojan horse, and they roll the Trojan horse out.

Behind the Trojan walls and the soldiers jump out and kill everybody. That's what sloth is. The horse is the busyness. The Trojan horse is the cell phones, is the busy calendar, it's all of that stuff. It's all of the activities. It's thinking that our kids have to be all of these things. It's thinking that mom and dad have to have 15 friends going all the time, all the social media, paying all the bills, just having to buy something because of our consumeristic attitude, like just makes us feel better just to go buy anything.

Those are the busy things, but what's hidden inside it is sloth. That's why the devil wants families to be busy. If they are if he can distract us with busyness, then we are spiritually exhausted, Joey, and we cannot pray and give what God is owed. So the sin of this age is sloth. So long-winded answer to your question: what does dysfunction look like? It looks like a super busy family.

But in s and and that might they might look good, they might be in shape. You might look at that family, look how much they accomplish. But inside is sloth. That's the hidden secret sin hiding within. And ultimately that is what kills families. That is the true definition of a dysfunctional family.

Joey (10:40)

So good. There's so much to unpack there. You made me think of just the reality that everything's upside down. And there's like this overwhelm that leads us, like you said, to neglect the most important things in our lives that help keep things ordered. Remember one of my friends saying that the Industrial Revolution attacked labor, the sexual revolution attacked love, and then the digital revolution attacked leisure. And so all these like major components of our lives have been like attacked and distorted and turned upside down. That it's

It's no surprise to me that things are so dysfunctional. Even like as you're speaking, I'm like, even if you don't have a marriage and a family, it's like yeah, look at young people today or people in general, our lives are upside down. And so I guess shifting the conversation a little bit is like how do we order things properly so that we have a healthy and functional life and therefore a healthy and functional family? Like, what does that look like? Is that even possible?

Conor Gallagher (11:33)

You know, I I wrote a little book called You're Never Too Busy, Understanding Your Time the Way God Understands Your Time. And okay, so that book started with like a true story. So I'm standing outside of church on a Sunday, everybody's having small talk. And you know, the way we just have small talk, like the weather. it's a nice day. People say, Staying busy, staying busy, or how you doing, Joey? busy. That's what we all say. That's what we all do. We all say it. Okay? Somebody asked me that one time and people

Trust me, they really asked me that because of the seventeen kids and other stuff I do. So they

Joey (12:10)

I mean businesses, CEO, like yeah, you have your handful.

Conor Gallagher (12:13)

So the guy looked at me and he said, staying busy. And I went, No, why are you? And he was like, and I just saw like the he just did he was like deer in headlights. And then I said, Of course I'm busy. Yeah. Like, but then I with that, I just reflected on that moment and the fact that I said, No, why are you? I saw the reaction that he had and I pondered that. And what it so now

If you asked me when we first met five minutes before the episode, and you said, you're staying busy, I would say, No, no. I never say I'm busy anymore. I stopped saying I'm busy. Okay. And there's a this is really answering your question, I promise. Like it's because if if the ailment is that the modern world is too chaotic, too busy, too strung out, which of course results in, you know, an epidemic of anxiety and depression and all of those things, all the things that the pharmaceutical company

or trying to solve, you know, with pills. But if we could stop thinking of ourselves as busy. And I actually went to the dictionary and looked up busy. Well, if you actually check this out, the way it's defined it's all negative. It's a very negative term, yet we use it as a badge of honor. We say we're busy and we want to look busy because it makes us feel important. It makes us feel important. So busy, the the first definition is like a busy design. Like if you're designing

like my desk here like is busy, it's bad. It's it's it's cluttered. So a busy design is clutter. No one wants clutter. Like, you know, if somebody dresses in like a busy way, we it it looks silly and gaudy. It looks gaudy, right? So busy first means that it's cluttered. The other way is it means a busy body, which is like somebody who is sticking their nose everywhere that doesn't really belong, like a gossip, right? So a busy body is always saying,

Like I I see this all the time in, you know, church world. But people will say, well, I want to tell you about Susie Q, who's you know, really going through some bad stuff. And I I'm only telling you this so that you can say a prayer for her. And and then it's total defamation. I mean, it's just total scandalous what people do. That's a busybody, so they're sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. By the way, I realized one day you're scrolling through the news and you look at like, you know, you know, whoever like

the personal, you know, life or the divorce of some celebrity. Brad Taylor, yeah. You want to look at it and you're like, well, why am I intruding in on this person's life? Just because they're a celebrity doesn't mean I have a right to just like know the dirt on them. So we live we live in this busybody world. And then obviously the next definition of busy is occupied. When I see the word occupied, I think of like a Portigon. You know, it's like, you know, like you're kind of

You're doing something gross in there and it says occupied, right? So why do we love the de the word busy? It's because we it just makes us feel good. So I think we have to do two things. One, we obviously have to cut stuff out of our life. We have to declutter. And that's that's a conversation. We can talk about how to declutter. But the other thing is that we also like Joey, if you were to take

20 things that you have to do in your life, everything from this podcast to husband to father to everything else that you're doing in life, and you have this long 20 items on your list, and you're saying, okay, I'm too busy, I gotta cut stuff out. Let's say you cut out five of them. Okay, good. How many times do we take that to-do list and pray before God and say, Lord, what do you want me to cut from this list? Like we don't, we think it, we don't pray it. Okay. We think about it, we don't pray about it. So the first step on getting a to-do list down.

Is to ask God, here's my list. I wrote it on a piece of paper. God, here's my list. Here's my 20 things. And I want you to tell me in prayer five things that you want me to cut out. Okay. So that's the first step. Okay. Very practical, very easy. Then let's say you have 15 things left and it's still a lot. And Joey's still busy. And Joey has to do all of these things. Well, then the next part is the spiritual level that's hard for people to understand.

If you've concluded that God wants you to do all of those 15 things in your life, if he wants you to be on the church group, if he wants you to work out in the morning, if he wants you to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He wants you to do all those things. Maybe he wants you to fail at some of them. And we don't like to think like that, but it's the spirituality of imperfection. Sometimes God just wants us to be mediocre at things. And I have to recognize that sometimes. So I might have so much to do on my to-do list that I kind of don't do anything super well.

So either A, I haven't cut stuff from the list that I should, and or B, God just wants me to do those things, but doesn't always want Connor to be victorious. Not every business plan I come with up with succeeds. That doesn't mean it was against God's will. Maybe he wants me to try to work out four days a week, but I only get two. That's a failure. But maybe it's not a failure because it's exactly what God wants me to go through. So if people in today's world could see that being

mediocre at things and failing at things and the human level of failure, it might be God's will for them anyway. So when you have that perspective, what it does is you stop saying I'm busy. Actually how I usually respond is if I'm not behaving well, I'm busy. Like like, you know, when I'm being bad, I'm busy. But if I say I'm busy, that's almost to me like admitting a sin. That's almost like because I'm that means I am doing all of these things that are not very admirable.

Rather, I'd rather say with my own free will, I control my life, I control my calendar, I put things on there, I make decisions. I had 17 kids, that was my decision. So I should not go around trying to sound important by saying I'm so busy. So I'm either very focused and that's good, and I have a lot to do, and I might fail at some things, and that's okay. Or I'm sinning, I'm being dysfunctional, and therefore I'm busy. So yeah, sometimes I am busy, Joey.

But that is instead of a bragging right like I used to do it and most people do, now that's an admission of guilt. So I think the first step in becoming a well-ordered family or a well-ordered individual is stop thinking about yourself as so busy. Because A, you're probably not nearly as busy as you think you are. B, you got stupid crap on your to-do list that you haven't even asked God to take off there. And C, you think that you have to get an A plus.

On this entire port card report card, and you don't, that is not necessarily God's will for you. So that's that's a mindset. We haven't really talked about practical things, but I think that mindset is a huge shift for people. And now they can start managing their family in a much more healthy way. But we have to change the mindset about being busy is not a good thing. That's actually a bad thing.

Joey (19:10)

really good. No, that's helpful. And you're right. Like we just we think that's synonymous with importance. And I think that you just hit the nail on the head. I love how you broke down the word and everything. I was talking to this really wise, successful businessman not long ago and his take on this is really similar to yours in that that he says he's like most people don't think deeply. And because we don't think deeply we end up making decisions and doing things that are kind of automatic, accidental.

And we end up in these situations like we were describing before, where our families are a mess, our lives are a mess, and we don't really we look up and we're like, I don't really know how I got here in some ways. Like like you said, we're we're to blame. Like it's we're not victims. This was a choice, even if it wasn't super deliberate. And so so I thought there was a lot of wisdom in what he said that we don't like take time to think. And my response to him was actually, well

Maybe it's because we're so busy. And he's like, or is it because we're so busy because we don't actually take time to think deeply? So I think there's there's so much there. But if you want to add anything to that, feel free. But I was wondering, I wanted to understand more of like your whole inspiration for the system that you built without going into all the nitty gritty details. Like, was there a particular moment when you had this idea that like I need to come up with some sort of a system that helps families run well? So why did you build this? If your parents divorce and it's shattered your world, I have an invite for you.

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Conor Gallagher (20:53)

There was definitely a process that led me to this, but then there was kind of like, you know, a straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. So it's I think a lot of dudes out there can relate to this more than the women. I mean I'm not a woman, but I I think guys can relate to this a lot more than the typical woman. I am the man at work. I'm good at my job. I come in for years now. I have come in, come in with a plan, I kick ass all day, make money, build a team, communicate well.

Analyze the crap out of things, execute, you know, when things go wrong, I do postmortems, I figure out what went wrong, I improve it, I motivate and lead my team, I cut the bad stuff out, I add good stuff in. I'm good at my job. And I did that for years. And then I go home every day and I'm an idiot and I'm lazy and my wife never sees any of those things I just said. And I just I just tuck my tail and say, honey, tell me what to do. And my family would never see.

The Connor that other people saw. I mean, it's like it was like two people. It was like two people. I'm like a winner at work and a loser at home. Like, and I mean, of course I'm generalizing and of course I'm oversimplifying. And I'm not trying to say I'm that great businessman. I'm I'm I'm not. Okay. I'm just but I'm on my a for me, I was on my A game every day at work, and then I was on my C game at home. And the excuse that we use is, well, that's our refuge. That's our, you know, I work all day and I go home. I gotta like.

Let my hair down, so to speak. I gotta put my feet up and I gotta relax. And I don't wanna have to do all of that hard human being stuff when I go home because I'm there to rejuvenate. So I can go back and do it the next well, that's fine for a day or two, but over the course of 15 years, your family just gets the loser. Yeah. So that started to bother me. And I'm like, why why does my family not know?

The good traits that I have. Like she might see as some result, you know, in the sense of like, you know, a paycheck or, you know, what whatever it may be, or long-term employees, good relationships, good friends. You know, I'm at lunch with a friend yesterday and we were talking about tough stuff, and he told me he had cancer. Okay. Well, like Connor was on his A game. I was on his I was on my A game the whole time. I'm on my A game now, talking to you, excited, energetic, charismatic.

You know, trying to share thoughts, deep thoughts, trying to communicate well and I go home and my wife wants to talk about her day and she wants to talk about figuring out how to get the lawnmower fixed, so we can cut the grass again, or she needs to talk about, you know, the kids' schedule and the logistics of getting things here and there. She wants to talk about finances, like, are we gonna buy this, are we gonna buy that? The homeschooling, she wants to talk about and I'm just like, whatever whatever, whatever.

You know, I've become like the the laziest employees that I've had, and you're like, why is this deadhead here? You need to get out. And I'm I'm that I'm that guy at home. I'm that guy at home. So real. And so it's like, wait a minute, this is not okay. Yeah. So one day a number of years ago, like I felt this building. And by the way, I also I strongly believe politically incorrect, but I strongly believe that the husband is the spiritual head of the family. I agree. And I did not like

What the hell does that mean? Like it's just hard for me to act. What does it mean? I I know what it means to be a COO or CEO, you know, but my wife makes she's incredibly competent, she's incredibly organized, and she just runs that household like a well-oiled machine. And then I come home and I'm supposed to be the leader? What what? You know, like so as a spiritual leader, I just lead the rosary at night. Okay, you know. So what does this mean to be a spiritual leader, you know?

And I I never really knew. Like I've, you know, I've read books about manhood and I've given I'd give talks about manhood. I mean, for years. But if you really pin me down, what does it mean to be the spiritual head of this family? When when she's there running this ship and this complicated ship every single day, what does it mean I come home and from like six to eight, you know, when the kids are awake until they go to bed, I'm the spiritual head of this family? I didn't know what that meant. So

That was a problem that was brewing in my heart and mind over a number of years. Couple that with she never saw the good Connor, she just saw the lazy, dumb Connor, right? So one day she was complaining about not able to get the kids to do their chores properly. And it was just the hundredth battle on that. I mean, imagine my household by the end of the day. I mean, it looks like a bomb went off. I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just it does. So getting the chores done is really important to her.

Yeah. So I saw her every day. She was kind of doing like a lot of brand new business COOs would do, like just kind of barking out orders. You do the chores tonight, you do the floors tonight, you vacuum tonight. And it was just kind of random. And I realized I've been so checked out for so long. This is what we do every night. We bark at the kids and make everybody I was like, honey, we need some like lean six sigma management philosophy here. Like we need to we need a

We need to bring in like a chore chart, organize this thing and delegate and have like a scorecard to where we know like if the kids did something right, they get a check. If they didn't, they get an X. Like we need to start treating this like a business plan, because this is like a small business. So she looked at me and she's like, All right, Mr. Businessman, why don't you figure out how to get the chores done? And I'm like, Okay, by golly, I'll do it. You know, here's

I finally get to wear my business hat, you know? So so I was like, watch this, honey, you know. I got the big huge whiteboard out. I got her to answer all my questions of like what she wanted to get done. And I just made our very first chore chart. And that's nothing j brilliant, like a lot of people have a chore chart. But for us, it was like a game changer because we were just like two little tyrants barking at the kids every night to get it done, right? It's like a CEO that has a thousand helpers versus

a a person who's managing and delegating, you know? Totally. So we made our first chore chart, and that's the day. Like I remember having the big whiteboard in my little living room and my markers. And like I remember drawing, I remember that day. And that's when I was like, you know, I wonder what other business tools could work for a family. You know, could we have a vision statement? Could we have a scorecard? Could we have quarterly goals? Hmm. Can we have family meetings? Hmm. And

That's when I started saying, there's something here. And that's the reason I'm going through that, Joey, is that's when I realized for me, maybe this is part of, it's not the only, but part of me being the spiritual leader of this family. Is I'm able to bring some of this knowledge and help bring order and joy to this family by helping it run a little bit more like a well-oiled machine than the way it was going at the time.

So that's that was the day where I said, I gotta I gotta businify business fy this household to some extent. And that that embarked, you know, that started a whole journey and a book and hours of video and everything else to what now we have as a well ordered family. So yep, there you go. That's the answer.

Joey (28:17)

That's incredible. No, I love it. I wanna zoom to the end a little bit for someone listening. Like share if you would any stories that you have of families who've used the system, they've put it into place. Like how have they gotten better? How have they transformed?

Conor Gallagher (28:30)

You know, I don't know if you'll like this answer or not like this answer, but you know, yes, there are some examples of people who like use the tools that I've created. I've created over thirty tools that can help people resolve conflict, that can help people prioritize, make a vision statement, have quarterly goals, etc. agendas for different types of family meetings. Like not all not all business meetings are the same. You know, like your your daily stand up in the hallway meeting.

Is going to be very different than your annual strategic planning session. Very different. Very different. You know, so I made all of these things, but the success stories are not when people like use a tool to figure out whether we should they should purchase a minivan or a suburban. And I have a tool to help you do something like that. Like, do you buy A or B? You know, it's just a decision matrix. It's like there's simple ways to make decisions in life. And there's real good business tools. And by the way, the people who are

The best at this stuff in the world are business people. Why? Money's on the line. Yeah. So when money's on the line, you perform. You perform, which is why Connor's on his A game at work and on his C game at home. Like that's why, right? So our brains kick in the gear when we're when we got to make money. That's why the best thinking on systems management, people management has been in the business world because money. So so families got left out. But here's the success story to really answer your question. It's when people realize

They're no longer a victim to their circumstances. That's the mental shift. When they make that mental shift, screw my tools, screw my book. You don't need any of that. What you need is mom and dad together to realize they have built kind of a mess and they have free will and they have the ability and they always have the money, even though sometimes they think they don't. They have all the means necessary to build the family life that they want. Now that doesn't mean the house that they want, the boat that they want.

But we are a victim generation, man. Everything is victimization, right? And it's weird because like people want to be a victim because they want people to feel sorry for them. They want to go on social media and cry in front of everybody. Like they want everybody to say, poor you, poor Joey, poor Joey. You know, that that's everybody feels good when when people reach out and do that. So once you realize that that is not a bragging right, but that you are a mature

Adult with God given talents and abilities, given all your imperfections, and your spouse is a mature adult with a free will with all of their imperfections, and you realize this is in our control. We are not victims of Facebook, Instagram, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Little League, School. We're not victims to this. We're not victims to financial problems. We can make decisions and work our way out of that.

We are not victims. We are not victims. We can control this. And with God's grace, we can have a healthy, happy, joyful family life. Joey, all that's needed is that shift. That's all that's needed. And I'm telling you, that's the that's the disease is families feel like it's gone. They're it's all it's already gone. They can't fix it. I've had so many people that hear my talks on Wilder family and they come up to me and they say, Well, you know, my youngest is in high school, so too late for me.

And I'm like, whoa, are you dying tomorrow? Like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? So people always feel like they're too far in the ditch to get out of the ditch. It's a cop out, dude. Total cop out. I've had and so I've even had grandparents who learn all of these things I'm talking about so they can work on their own marriage as empty nesters, because that's a whole nother time when people start getting divorced is because now the kids aren't there to create the interference, right?

Now they have to look at each and like crap, I haven't liked this person in 30 years. What am I gonna do now? Yeah. You know, you know probably about that more than I do given your expertise in this. But also, grandma, grandpa can help their younger, stressed out kids who have two or three kids themselves, you know, to kind of bring order and structure into their life. So

Joey (32:38)

So good.

Conor Gallagher (32:39)

it's it's Joey, it's about the success is when the person leaves my talk or leaves my book or my videos and says, My wife and I can get together.

We can go to Starbucks, we can chart out a new path, we can come up with a plan, we can do this, and we're gonna fail on along the way, but we are gonna do this together and we're not gonna be victims of our circumstances. And it's amazing. One more point on this to just kind of drive it home, dude. If mom and dad, there's totally dysfunctional at home, the kids are strung out, they don't like each other, all those nasty things I've said. But if they got together and said, we're gonna start a business together.

We're going to start a coffee shop together, whatever it was going to be. If they decided like they had to create a business together, what would they do? Like just think about the rhythm of their life. They'd get a babysitter or they'd put the kids to bed. They'd sneak away and they'd go work together. And they'd have paper and pen and they'd say, Okay, what are you gonna do? Well, I'm gonna do the marketing. You know, what are you gonna do? I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the coffee. I'm gonna interfa interface with the customers and I'm gonna be the accountant. Or they might say,

Neither one of us is any good at the accounting, but I have this friend who's good at accounting. We're gonna outsource through they would get together like business colleagues, and then all of a sudden, husband and wife would be working like a team, like they never did when it came to raising their own children. Wow. So it's it think about that. As soon as mom and dad would start a family business together, they would have I'm not saying they wouldn't fight, they probably would, but they would start doing activities to communicate, to plan, to budget, to delegate.

They'd recognize each other's strengths and weaknesses. They would agree on those and act based upon them. They would do all of these things for a freaking coffee shop, but they won't do it for their kids, for their own marriage. So it's a mindset, man. None of this is hard. It's this the mindset, and they that's why I think the little business concept here can help just think like your family is a coffee shop.

And you're gonna turn a part of your brain on that for some stupid reason we turn off when we're in mom and dad mode.

Joey (34:45)

Yeah. No, it's so good. I remember hearing someone say that exact same thing of like it was Adam Lane Smith, the attachment specialist, he came on our show recently and he was on another podcast saying like you really need to look at your spouse as like a business partner. And so I love like that you're saying that too. I'm ch thinking through this idea of like victimhood, 'cause I think it's so true. It's one of the top misconceptions people have about what I'm doing too. And so it's something we have to push back against, because there

I I love Dave Ramsey actually has a great little bit on this. He talks about like he you might have been a real victim, because there are real victims. yeah. yeah. But you're not meant to remain a victim. And I think there's so much wisdom in that. And he goes on to say, like, you know, God feeds the birds, but he doesn't throw the worms into the nest. And so he's saying like you you gotta work, like you gotta basically take ownership, stop blaming everyone, which is hard. I I'm guilty of that too. It's easier to blame and and get it done. But I'm curious, like

How do people make that switch? So so you mentioned like hearing a talk or maybe reading a book or something like that. One of the things that's been helpful for me personally that I try to do with the young people is like showing them examples of people, especially like military or the saints, who maybe went through something really grueling where it would have been really easy for them to say, like, hey, the world did this to me. I'm broken now. I can't ever be better. But in fact, they didn't do that. They took ownership, they took action. Even if they weren't to blame for the problem, they didn't cause it.

They took ownership of the solution. So I'm curious, how do we get people, whether it's mom and dad and a family or an individual who's struggling with this, to shift from be identifying as a victim to something else? For countless teens and young adults, their parents' divorce is actually the most traumatic thing that they've experienced. But so many feel lost and alone in navigating the challenges. I've been there myself. It's really not easy and it shouldn't be this way. My book, It's Not Your Fault.

guides them through those challenges by helping them put their pain into words and begin to heal, work through the emotional problems that they face, cope in healthy ways instead of falling into bad habits, improve their relationship with their parents, navigate the holidays and other life events, and build healthy relationships and so much more. One Amazon review said this This book is packed full of really practical help. If you come from a broken family, or even if you don't but you love someone that does, this book is so helpful. I can't recommend this enough.

By the way, it's a quick read and it doesn't need to be read cover to cover since it's in question and answer format. You can just read one of the questions and one of the answers. And so if you want to join the thousands of people who've gotten a copy, just go to restored ministry dot com slash books to get the book or download the free chapters. Again, that's restored ministry dot com slash books, or just click the link in the show notes.

Conor Gallagher (37:24)

I think you just w gotta work your way out of it to some extent. So, like, you know, the very first thing the first thing I recommend is not a vision statement. Like that that's I I mean, I love vision statements. I'm a vision statement fanatic, right? But, you know, if you're starting a business, you usually it starts because like you're already selling something, you're making something and selling something. And then down the road you're like, Yeah, this is like a real thing. I kind of need a business model here, you know. So I think mom and dad need to come together and say,

One simple line, mom and dad can to get out of victimhood. Okay. It's this simple. We are not only going to work in the family, we're going to work on the family. We are not only going to work in the family, we're going to work on the family. And everybody knows don't just work in your business, work on your business, right? I mean, we got to do the same thing. So mom and dad, and I've had coaching clients, and it's like the first thing is like go to Starbucks, go to dinner with a blank piece of paper and pencil, start writing stuff down that you want.

Like what is it in this life that you want to do? What is and don't necessarily I'm not saying like bucketless stuff. I'm saying real targeted. Like in the next 90 days, what are some tangible concrete things you want to do? Like for me, Joey, I've had a broken down tractor sitting in my gravel driveway for about two years. It's terrible. It's just an eyesore. And I just can't seem to get my crap together to hire the tractor mechanic to come and get that. My wife wants that piece of crap working or gone, and I need to do it.

So I get that. You know, so it's like there's I can come up with a hundred things like that, but you need to go sit down away from children, away, banish the children, away, children. And you need to take a piece of paper and a pencil and say something as simple like, okay, we are now working on the family. We're not in the family right now. 99.999% of all of your activity is in the family. Dishes, bedtime, bills, work, school, everything.

Well, you have to separate out and say we're working on the family. And so you say in the next ninety days, what are some of the goals we think we can accomplish? You know, we're not going to get out of debt in ninety days. Don't be stupid. But it might be maybe we make, you know, an extra payment on the mortgage, or it might be we want to clean out the garage because we're tripping ourselves every time we walk in and out of it. If you saw my garage right now, Joey, you you would be scandalized. You probably never would even talk to me if you saw I mean it's it's bad. But like

What are some practical and and mom might come up and say, I I want to create a chore chart. Okay. We're not gonna do that here, right now at Starbucks, but we're gonna get that done in the next 90 days. So what are the things that mom is gonna be the champion of in the next 90 days? And are there any suspense dates? Like, can she say, Yeah, I can definitely get that chore chart done in the first 30 days? And then maybe dad's like, All right, give me sixty days and I will get that tractor out of the freaking driveway. I will do it, Hunt. I will do it, right? And then the ninety days, maybe it's like

Hey, in the next 90 days, maybe we save up enough money to make a payment on the house. Like, I'm just making crap up, but the point is, is like some things are owned by a person, maybe some things are collective, but that's how you run a business, isn't it? Like you have some things, you gotta have a specific champion. Some things are more teamwork, some things are more solo work. So you recognize that, write it on the piece of paper, and then don't worry if it's an eyesore. Take that piece of paper and stick it on the refrigerator, okay?

And it's like, okay, it doesn't go with the decor very well of my Pinterest type who gives a crap? You know, put it on the countertop, put it in the pantry, put it somewhere where you're gonna see it five times a day or fifty times a day, and look at it, have your pencil and check. Like I literally for a long time I had a scorecard. We're not talking about scorecards, but it was hanging in the pantry where you go in a hundred times a day. And I and I literally nailed a a nail in the wall with a pencil hanging with the string.

So to so it's always there. So I can always check off the scorecard. What are we getting done? What are we not getting done? But you have to make it so easy, even where like the pencil is there. So it's like screaming that pencil saying, Pick me up and make the mark, please. It's made you know, you have to make it that easy. So the first step to start that mindset. That that was the question. How do you get the mindset? Mom and dad get out of the family and they work on the family. And they can pick whatever they want. But I would recommend

Coming up with 90-day goals. Do not pick 20 goals. Don't pick one. Pick somewhere between three and seven. Okay. Two good biblical numbers. Stay in there and make sure that you assign. And and and by the way, you can't pick something like have a more joyful family in 90 days. What the hell does that mean? Like you can't measure that. You can't measure that. So it needs to be concrete things where it's like, there's first base. We can run to first base. And you know when you're there and you know when you're not.

Right. It needs to be something like we got it done or we didn't get it done. Don't say eliminate the conflict between the children. You can't measure. There's always going to be some. You can't. So pick very tangible, measurable things that you can say it's done, not done, you know. And so pick those. Don't go high-level philosophy. Don't go write your big vision statement. Don't yet.

Yet, right? Don't don't scare you yourself out of this, but have your first spousal meeting away from the rug rats. Tangible things that you do, yes or no. And and when you walk away from that and you're driving back home, you know what? You just escaped the mindset of victimization. You just did it. You just so you know, they also say like going to counseling is like half the battle. Like

It's it's or maybe press probably like ninety percent. It's probably not even the fact that that what you know, the advice that the counselor gives you. It's the fact you're recognizing you need help. That's like, you know, say like I'm an alcoholic. You know, I picked up my twenty five year chip recently. It's like going to the meeting, that's like ninety percent. It's not necessarily what you hear, but you're admitting you need help. You're admitting you have a problem. Well, guess what? When mom and dad go to Starbucks or they put the kids away and they sit at the coffee table or the at the kitchen table

And they have a meeting. They're in meeting time now. They make it real. Now they are admitting to themselves and to each other that we are working on our family and we're taking little baby steps together. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but we're working on this together and we're gonna try to start making headway. Now they have just escaped the victimization mindset. That's beauty, that's the power. It sounds so ridiculously simple.

But look at all the families that don't do that. That's the trick.

Joey (44:17)

So good. All right. Well I'm committing to do that with my wife. I appreciate you challenging me and everyone listening to that. I think that's simple enough, but it's also something that's meaningful enough that you can, you know, get the ball rolling. And I like that I like that concept that like you don't think your way out of victimhood, you act your way out of victimhood. I think that that rings very true to to me and the experiences of the young people that I've walked with. So

Conor Gallagher (44:41)

You know atomic habits, right? You know, that famous book, right? I d I read it. By the way, you talked earlier about deep work sort of. there's the my favorite business book is Deep Work. Do you know that book by Cal Newport?

Joey (44:53)

Yeah.

Conor Gallagher (44:54)

It's amazing. But like so eventually you get after you do these little meetings and little Starbucks things with your wife, now you're getting to where you can do more deep work. Like, what do we really want to be like in 10 years? You know, now now your your muscles flexing. So I'm connecting that more deep work side.

With and going to Starbucks, that's a little deep work, right? That's a little deep work, right? For an hour, right? But atomic habits, one of my favorite parts in there is, you know, some fat dude would just who had to get in shape. He would just once a day in the morning, like put his workout clothes on. And then he would just drive to the gym. Like and he'd even work out initially. But after he did that a few days, he's Well, I'm here, I might well work out. Form the habit of putting on your stupid shoes to work out. Put your workout clothes on just to form the habit.

The kicker there, like the mental shift, Joey, was not that he worked out. The mental shift was that he just put his workout clothes on. Right. So the mental shift of like working your way out of this victimization is having a designated meeting with your spouse. I'm I'm gonna get real practical for for yourself and for your audience. Don't go up to your wife and be like, Hey, you wanna have a you know, I heard this guy on his podcast and

Hey kids, go watch a TV c go watch a cartoon. We're gonna have this family meeting right now. You ready? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not it. That's not it. It's better to say, Honey, this is important. Let's put it on our calendar for a week from now. Okay. I put it on my calendar, you put it on your calendar. If we can get a babysitter, even better, right? We're gonna put it on our calendar and I'm gonna prepare for this. I'm gonna think about this and you do the same thing, and we're gonna come together in that and we're gonna

We're gonna have this family meeting together, okay? That is a hundred times better. It communicates a hundred times more things than just saying, hey, let's roll. What do you want to get done in the next 90 days? Let's do no, no, no, no, no. Treat it like a business meeting. That's the environment where you are, if you're at home and the kids go to bed, get your cup of tea out, declutter the table, get a get a pad of paper and pens. Each have that. Make it real.

It's all of those little things around it. That's like the dude putting his tennis shoes on before he worked, right? Forming those human habits. And God, this is an incarnate God. And He wants us to use these bodies and these natural things to become holier. So it's all of these practical little things do lead ultimately to a spiritual revolution in your mind and heart with your family. But it begins on the natural level.

Joey (47:33)

So good, man. I wish I could spend hours and hours with you. I know we're close to the end of our time here. Let's say someone listening right now is like, man, I want to use this in my family or I want to have this in my back pocket for when the day comes when I'm married and I have a family. What would you recommend for them to go deeper into this content to learn more from you? Obviously you have the book, but tell us a little bit more about the resources you offer to teach people how to do this.

Conor Gallagher (47:56)

Yeah, so well ordered family dot com, you know, I got like eight hours of video I've filmed on that. And that's you know, the I got books, I got little books associated with it. So there's plenty of content. But you know, given that your audience and and your focus here is like on dysfunction and families, you know, here is yeah, so wellderfamily.com, wellderfamily.com, go there, fine. But more importantly, I think that this going back to this mind shift, whether they're married or not, I think

In prayer, talk about deep work, whether it's early in the morning before people are woken up, or whether you're driving home and you want to stop by the church, or whether you just want to stop by somewhere and have some deep work in your mind, turn off your cell phone, get a piece of paper and pencil, and start writing out like, what do I want to be? Like, how do I want to be different from what I had in the past? All of this is like if you came from a broken family, if you saw your parents' imperfections. I mean, my parents never got divorced.

my dad had a previous marriage and that so I have a half brother and that added a a weird factor into everything. But my mom's a sinful person, my dad's a sinful person because I mean they're great people, but I'm saying everybody is that every every family's broken in one way or another. So we should all, no matter how broken, we should all say, What are the good things I got and how do I want to be different? Like you it all of this is going back into put yourself back in the driver's seat and tell yourself, this is what I want to.

Be in life. This is what I want to accomplish. Like start thinking about these things. Start act putting little actions. Like if you're married, going on that, you know, business meeting with your spouse, but you can go get the resources. You have to start working on your life. And I highly suggest pen and paper. Even neurologically, neuroscientists are showing that the brain works differently with pen and paper than your iPad. Okay. I mean, it really does. So I'm saying this.

Because it all begins with escaping that victimization. So, you know, when I've given a lot of well ordered family talks, I'm amazed at how many non-married people, like college kids, have come. I gave a talk at Seek a couple years ago on Well Order Family, and I had a thousand people show up, and most of them were college kids. And I'm like, Why are you guys here? You're not married. And they all came up and they're like, because my childhood was hard. And I don't want to repeat that. I d I I want my kids to have something different.

So there's that longing. So I know a lot of your listeners are not even married because they're craving something more than they had. And that's a beautiful thing. I mean, my dad was better than his dad, and I'm not saying I'm better than my dad, but I want to be better than him and I want my kids to be better than me. Like this is the process, right? So, but take time, take the time after this, sometime soon, sometimes in the next couple days, get away by yourself. Think about these things.

You can't just have it turning around the back of your head while you're doing everything else in life. This deserves your concentration. What were the problems in your life? How do you want to overcome them? How do you want to be different? What kind of man or woman do you want to be? What kind of family do you want to have one day? That will help you choose who you're dating. That'll help you decide whether you break up. That will help all kinds of things. And if you're married, you got to do that deep work as well. And then you got to have those meetings. But the main thing, be intentional and think deeply.

And then start putting little things into action. So yeah, my resources can help you with that. But whether you ever go to my website, you know, this to me, this is a success if it just causes one person to sit down and pray and think that they have free will given to them by Almighty God, and they can choose to live a different life than they were given in their childhood. That's a that is freedom, man. Joey.

There's nothing more free than that. That is so freeing. That is empowering. That is motivating. That is humbling. It's powerful. And we underestimate our free will every single day. All of us do. I do every 10 minutes. If we would embrace the humility that, my gosh, God loved me so much that He's given me the power to choose heaven or hell and everything in between all every day of my life. I have the power in my free will today to.

To condemn myself to hell by living a terrible life or to become a holy saint, that's what more power is there in life? So you every listener, you guys have that power. If you have that power, trust me, you have the power to live a good and virtuous life and to build healthy marriages and healthy families down the road. That's that should be, you know, that's that's easy to believe if we're able to to ultimately choose heaven or hell.

Joey (52:38)

So good. And I think w sometimes young people kind of will tell me, Well, I don't really know what I want in life. And I I think doing that exercise you described and maybe even starting with the things that you don't want. It's like, well, I came from this type of family and I know I don't want it to look like that. I found it's a good place to start. And then hopefully you start to uncover some of those deeper desires like you described where it's like, Well, I I would really like this or I would like that or and I think in time it doesn't all ha all have to happen at once.

you'll create this really beautiful, like you said, vision, plan, ideas for your life that make it certainly a life worth living. So I I think that's that's so good.

Conor Gallagher (53:19)

One comment on that. So it's like in back into business, I relate all this to business. This is kind of what I do. I love So like you're running a podcast. Okay. Think of that as a business and somebody can say I call this analogs and antalogues in in business. So a business can compare themselves in this way or that way to these businesses, these competitors. And then you can have an antalogue, which is like, I don't want to be like these. Not that they're bad, it's just I want to be different, right? So like you could say in this podcast, you could say, Well, an ant

Analog is I want to be like the Tucker Carlson podcast in this way, and I want to be like the Joe Rogan podcast in that way, but I want to be very different too. I I I wanna my antalogue can also be Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson or whoever. I'm just making names. because I don't want to do it this way or that way. So writing these things out, like here's the people that you that you want to emulate, not like I wanna be just like them. No, no, no. Here's attributes. So

This person says, I don't want, I don't know what I want in life. Fine, you don't need to know that. But do you have people that you really admire? It could be just like heroes from the past. I want to have the courage and the gentlemanliness of George Washington. Okay. I want to have the joy of Saint Francis. I want to have the drive of a Donald Trump. But I do not want to have his other attributes. You know, I mean, like you can start listening or

You know, I want to be that kind and generous man like Uncle Joe. I always loved Uncle Joe. He was kind and sweet. I don't want Uncle Joe's financial mismanagement in his life, but I want to have that smile when he comes into the room. But I and then Aunt Jane, you know, she was always always very organized and efficient. Well, that's an attribute I really like her. Now, broken life, you know, three marriages, a disaster, but she had some really good traits as well. So I want to emulate those.

You start picking attributes of people that you know or that you've heard of that you like and start building those that write those out. And then also write the attributes of of people, friends or enemies that you don't want in your life. And so now you're painting a picture, Joey. You're painting a picture of attributes. Don't choose people, choose attributes that people have. Because you're you're never going to be that person in a good or bad way. It's just going to different.

But they all possess attributes or f or shortcomings that you want to embrace or avoid. And guess what? After you done every person on the planet can do this. Once they've done that, now they're starting to have a picture of what they want to be. And once they understand who they want to be, then they're ten times more likely to figure out what they want to do with their life or who they want to marry or their career.

So that's how you do it. You start with the attributes and again, that's a business tool that I've just applied to people.

Joey (56:13)

So good. And I and you could do the same thing with a family, I'm sure.

Conor Gallagher (56:16)

Absolutely. 100% perfect.

Joey (56:19)

Hmm. So good man. You're the man. This has been so good talking with you. one question I had about the book. So let's say someone gets the book and they're like overwhelmed because there's so much in there, it's dense, it's like there's so much value packed into it. Where do you recommend that they start to get moving through the book?

Conor Gallagher (56:36)

Yeah,

I would I would recommend that Yeah, it's the book is like a reference book, right? I mean it's like no one reads the encyclopedia from beginning to end. You know, it's it's you just but you pick out what you need from it. Field means in the good old days when we actually had encyclopedias, you know, showing my age here. But you know, I think you can go flip through and you see what resonates with you, like flipping through the contents and you're like, Hey, you know what? I heard what Connor said about the meetings, but I really would like to do a vision statement. Okay. Or

It might be, hey, you know, I think we need to get the family meetings going, or it might be the 90 day rocks or the go quarterly goals or a scorecard. Flip through, or you might be turning to that book because you're having a lot of family conflict. You and your wife are at each other's throat, or your 13 year old daughter has an attitude all the time and half your conversations blow up in conflict. Then go to the relationships part of the book where and you'll see in the table of cont where have tools for conflict resolution.

There's really good tools in there for conflict resolution. So there is no starting or stopping point. Look in it and see are you dealing with conflict? Do you want help financially? Do you want vision? Do you want quarterly goals? And just start anywhere, anywhere. But again, it's like start taking action now. Just start doing something very small. Yeah. Do not read that book cover to cover and try. That's not how it's, that's not how a business is built.

That's not how relationships are built. That's not even how virtue was built, you know? You start little steps at a time.

Joey (58:09)

So

good man. All right. I encourage everyone to grab that book and to yeah, keep it as a field manual w when you need it. And I I love that encouragement to like pick one perhaps the area of your family or your life that you need the most help in. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. You, my friend, have a lot of wisdom to offer. I want to give you the final word. again, really glad you came on the show and shared everything with us. what final advice or encouragement would you offer to everyone listening, especially to that young person who maybe feels

that they're not capable of building a healthy marriage and f family one day.

Conor Gallagher (58:44)

You know, I think about weight loss. I'll connect it. You know, yes, some people have very strange anatomical problems, chemical problems in their body, but ninety nine point nine nine percent of everybody, calories in, calories out. If you have a calorie surplus, you get fat. If you have a calorie deficit, you lose weight. You have too much calorie deficit, you die. Right? So it's like calories in, calories out. I think same th same thing with anything in your family life.

The work that you put into it, you're gonna get out of it. Like you have to make those deposits. You have to get the right amount, you have to eat the right amount of calories, so to speak, in your family life so that you can act in a certain way. So if you're not putting enough thought, prayer, energy, effort on communication skills, on vision, on tracking your tasks, you're gonna get crap.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of like a computer, like you put crap data in and you're gonna get crap data out, right? So, you know, again, that's back to that victimization thing, but you're in control, you have to do the work. You have to put the work in. And that doesn't mean do the dishes, doesn't mean cut the grass. Those are things that's working in. I'm talking about working on. So if your life, you want to get serious results, you wanna get dividends, you gotta make those deposits. It's funny that we just put so much work into all of these

things in our life, but we don't put a lot of work into the life itself. You know, we do so many hard things in a marriage, but we don't put work on the marriage. And so I just want them to think about that. It's everywhere in life. If you want results, you have to work at it. You have to put things in to get things out. You got to put the right amount in to get the right amount out. Whether it's calories in, calories out, or it's an investment and a return in the stock market. Your family life, your spiritual life, it's the same thing.

So you cannot be so prideful to think you don't have to put that hard effort in, and God's just gonna bless you uncontrollably. No, no, no. He's he's telling you, Connor, I've given you everything you need to go make this work. I have given Connor the ability to make Ashley Gallagher a happy and joyful wife. You know, I he gave me those abilities, and I've got it through sacramental grace, through marriage, but I have those abilities. I can do it. I have the grace and I have the natural abilities.

It's up to me now. It's up to me. So so put the work in, people. Put the work in. If you want to be joyful, work at it. You want to have good relationships, work at it. Whether it's my system or ten other systems out there, but you cannot just be reactive and coast through this. Failure is it's an absolute, if that's the case. Proactive work, steady work, hard work, hard prayer. I don't know anybody that quote unquote fails.

When that's the case.

Joey (1:01:43)

That wraps up this episode of this podcast has helped you. Feel free to subscribe and rate or review the show. You'll avoid missing future episodes and help us reach more people. And in closing, always remember you are not doomed to repeat your family's dysfunction. You can break that cycle and build a better life. And we are here to help. And keep in mind the words of C.S. Lewis who said, You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.