Bo: It’s very tricky in a relationship to be coaching your spouse. I would pretty much stay out of that.

Dawn: I don’t listen to anything he says. Zero.

Bo: She never does anything. She never participates.

Dawn: We were laughing about this the other day. Every New Year, he loves to get these big, big books and write his dreams for the year. Axel, our son, and Bo were downstairs for days working on their plans for 2016 and their goals and their dreams with these colored pens and big books. And then Bo sees Eloise, our oldest who’s 11, and goes, “Eloise, come in here. You’ve got to work on your dream book.” And she’s like “no.” So I said to Bo not everyone creates their dreams the way you want to create dreams. I do it my own way and who’s to say our dreams didn’t come true because of the way I did it. And he goes, “No, no they came true because I put them in this book.”

Bo: Yeah. Your dreams came true because I wrote them in the book with crayon.

Dawn: He goes “the only reason they came true is because I wrote them in the book.” And I’m like, “No. They were in my head.” So everyone does things differently. He’ll try to train me at the gym and I want no part of it. I’m just resistant.

Bo: She’s very rebellious.

Dawn: I don’t like to be told what to do. But then I love telling him what to do.

Bo: You mostly tell me what not to do.

Dawn: Yeah.

Bo: But you’re good at it. You’re clear about it. Sometimes I’ll say something on stage and she’ll go, “Don’t ever say that on stage again. And I’ll go “okay, cool.” It’s pretty simple.

Dawn: But you’re also really great at telling me what you need to hear and how you need to hear it and when. I don’t necessarily listen all the time, but …

Bo: You’re not a very good listener. You’re not a good student.

Dawn: But it does help …

Bo: If you were one of my clients I’d fire you.

Dawn: You’re great at saying, “Do it this way. If you tell me like this, it’s really going to hurt my feelings. But if you tell me later, I’ll be more open to it. So I think communication always helps, but no I don’t think we coach each other really. I guess I kind of coach you.

Bo: Not much though. It’s mostly like “go that way.” It’s very subtle.

Dawn: Yeah and the things that I feel really good about, like this is my position, this is what I do best, but maybe there’s another part of it that I’m unsure about, I always go to you and say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And the same thing with you.

Bo: But we don’t coach each other. We leave that to professionals. Coaching is a trust thing. I think it’s got to be a pro and you’ve got to be paying a coach or a mentor, somebody who’s got skin in the game, who can be honest and straight up with you. You want this to be a marriage and a building of things. You don’t want it to be like, “I don’t like your behavior. You should do this or talk like that or behave this way.” I don’t think that’s healthy in a relationship. Look, I love how you behave, even though it’s kind of mean sometimes (laughing). It’s still funny.

Dawn: I think if you look back to when we first met and if we were always this way or if we learned it, I just think we always worked on our relationship. I was 19, turning 20, when I met Bo and he dragged me into this seminar. I had never even been in that situation before, but it was great and I learned so much and I wouldn’t have been exposed to that necessarily at that young of an age. That person at the time became our coach and we worked through issues in our relationship or questions we had or things that we couldn’t see the same with him. And then later when Bo was writing his play, he really needed to see a therapist at the time to work through some of the emotional sides of it because it was really intense for him.

Then, we started seeing our therapist. Even the other day I said, “You need to get your shit together and call Rob. Like, really, we’re going down this path. This is not going to work out.” I wasn’t talking about us; it was a parenting thing. Just that we can be really honest with each other and then go find the help when you need it. I always tell couples that are engaged or newly married, start off working on your relationship when there’s nothing wrong. Just get in the habit of having conversations about things and realizing when it’s your stuff that comes up that you’re aware of it because you’ve gone through therapy, you’ve understood who you are, you know when you’re full of crap or not. It may take a day or two to figure it out, but you eventually figure it out.

Bo: That’s good. I think that’s great advice, really great. Go there and do the work before there’s problems. Just like getting your car serviced before it has a problem.

Dawn: Right: I’m sure it’s just fear of why people don’t go address those things when they come up. But I just don’t feel like we hold on to that much stuff and I don’t think we ever have. I think just both of us in general aren’t people who do that so we’re really lucky that way. But we’ve also worked really, really hard and have been really present and invested and never give up and fight for each other.

Bo: We’ve also had great coaches and mentors—really smart people that we’ve trusted and have given us great advice. The level of trust in our world keeps going down and now everyone’s kind of separating and not trusting one another. That’s why when you find a coach or mentor or somebody that you trust, you trust the instincts of that person, you go with them and in the directions that they point because usually they’re very smart and they know what they’re doing.