Wherever You Go There You Are – Introducing Cracking The Relationship Code And Host, Stan Padgett

Welcome to Cracking the Relationship Code, a podcast where your host, Stan Padgett talks about how you can make your marriage twice as strong. Stan’s goal is to save as many marriages as he can because with each failed marriage, comes a destroyed family. Children of divorce are at risk of drugs, alcohol, educational problems, and more. They need a stable home environment and it’s up to you to provide that. Come and start cracking the relationship code with your host Stan Padgett!

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Wherever You Go There You Are – Introducing Cracking The Relationship Code And Host, Stan Padgett

This is episode one of the show. This is a show about relationships, primarily intimate relationships. Understand that the principles that underlie successful relationships apply in business, life, school, and intimate relationships. It’s going to be the same. What we’re going to do is we’re going to explore all the possibilities, the things that make relationships work, and the patterns that make them not work or not successful.

It might be helpful to know a little bit about me. If it’s okay, I’d like to share a personal story with you. By training, I am a business trial lawyer. I graduated from Duke Law School in 1982. I’ve been a bit of a trial lawyer in Tampa, Florida since then. I love what I do, but during my lifetime, I’ve often had a lot of experiences that have given me insights into relationships, and what worked and what doesn’t work.

I had a wonderful childhood. I was the oldest of two. I had a younger brother who is about three and a half years younger than me. The one challenge that we had in our youth was my parents did not get along. I knew from the time that I was about eight years old that the day my younger brother graduated from high school, my dad was gone, and that’s exactly what happened. I saw things in my parents’ relationship that didn’t work that I didn’t want.

Growing up, I was a baseball player. The body I have wasn’t made for football or basketball, but I was pretty good at baseball. We had a lot of fun as kids playing ball. As I grew up, my dad once had a conversation with his older sister. He said, “Stan is only interested in two things: chicks and baseball.” What happened is before my senior year of high school, we moved from Bowling Green, Kentucky to Montgomery, Alabama so that my dad could open a brand new business. That change was what I wasn’t excited about at the time because I was leaving behind all of the friends I had since the third grade, and all of the kids I’d go to school with and play ball with. I would go into playtime with no one from my senior year in high school.

Meeting The Love Of Your Life

As it turns out, on October 1, 1976, I met the girl that I am married to now. In July of 2022, it will be 46 years later. I was a senior in high school. She was a sophomore. We went to rival high schools. We met because we were both working at the local Burger King. I joke with people for many years that that’s the last time I ever had it my way. It’s not so much true. The truth is that I was working one night and this girl came in with one of the other guys who worked there. One of the guys working with me knew her and called her by name. When he walked away, I turned around, grabbed hold of him and said, “Who was that?” I still remember exactly what she was wearing when I saw her. She completely knocked my socks off.

If you are happy at home and in your intimate relationship, you can handle any problem you encounter. Click To Tweet

I look over every morning and think, “I don’t know how I got this lucky, but I’m glad.” We were young. We ended up getting married when I was eighteen and she was seventeen. I had finished my freshman year of college. I look back on that and go, “What were we thinking?” We don’t know a couple who got married as young as we did who is still married. Did we have an easy time with it? Absolutely not. I was no picnic, and I’m still not, but we figured out a way to make it work because we were both committed to not having the experiences in our marriage or creating the experiences for our children that we had as kids.

The Challenges

My seventeen-year-old bride was unusually wise. In football parlance, we would say, “I outkicked my coverage,” and I did. Before we got married, she said, “You don’t have to do this, but if you do, it’s forever.” I thought about it for about 2 or 3 nanoseconds and said, “I’m in.” Some of the challenges we had were we were young and inexperienced. Neither one came from a background with any money, so we didn’t know very much about managing money. We just knew how to work hard.

We worked hard as a couple and as parents. I got a degree from law school. She got a PhD degree. We’ve been together all of our adult lives. The interesting thing is the older we’ve gotten, the better it has gotten. I cannot imagine my life without her, and I don’t want to. I saw one of the clips of the show, Yellowstone, where Beth said to Rip, “Promise me one thing. Promise me you will live one day longer than I do so I’d never have to spend another day without you.” That’s exactly how I feel about her.

What did that lead us to? We went to law school. We had one child when we started law school, a second child when we got done, and a third child three years after. Being a young lawyer, I spent an incredible amount of time working. She was taking care of the home and the children. I would come home from work and have dinner. I would take the children, bathe them, get them ready for bed, and read them stories while she cleaned up, and then we would have a little bit of time together.

Raising children was fun. I love having children. We have multiple grandchildren from age 20 to age 2. Spending as much time as I can with them is one of the most fun things in the world because, at the end of the day, this is why cracking the relationship code is important. All of our joy, the juice, passion, and fun out of life comes from our relationships, and primarily our intimate relationships. Think about this. If you are happy at home or happy in your intimate relationship, you can handle any problem in your job, business and education, but it doesn’t matter how well things are going in all those other areas. If you are miserable at home, you’re miserable.

Think about it this way. How many of you know people who have so much money that you think they have no money issues in the world or that money is not a part of something they even think about? If they want to go on vacation, they do it. If they want to buy a house, they do it, but they’re unhappy. How many of you also know people who have virtually nothing in the way of material things but are joyful? There’s a feeling in their home when you go in or when you’re around them that you wish you had. That’s what relationships bring.

The way this show is going to work is I’m going to do the talking sometimes. Sometimes, I’m going to have guest speakers. Sometimes, I’m going to look for audience questions from prior episodes where you’ll have information and content. You can put questions in, some topics you’d like to see. My purpose here is I want to change marriages. I want to save a million marriages in the next five years. That’s my mission. The reason is that saving marriages saves children. Divorce destroys children.

It was a pandemic long before COVID-19. We said, “The children will be fine.” Read the statistics. Read the research. Children of divorce are at risk of drug use, alcohol use, behavioral problems, educational problems, and a higher risk of suicide. They need a stable home environment, and we need to be able to give it to them. What I want to do is I want to help you. If you have a broken relationship, I want to help you fix it. If you have an okay relationship, I want to help you make it good. If it’s good, I want to help you make it great. If it’s great, I want to help you make it epic so that your children, children’s friends, and other people have some models of successful relationships.

Here’s a little bit of a story. My children this 2022 will be 45, 41 and 37. My daughter was in high school many years ago. Even then, most of her girlfriends were from single-parent homes and homes of divorce. It was interesting to watch. There’s this phenomenon that takes place from a teenage girl, or at least used to, where they have a best friend forever for about six weeks and then they have a new one. My daughter would bring home a best friend forever, and very quickly, she would decide I was dad. There are several of those women who are adults now who still call me dad because they needed a strong male figure in their lives. It’s interesting.

The basis of a lot of my background and the information that I have, and the experience that I have in dealing with relationships came in various ecclesiastical capacities where I worked with families with youths and adults. At one point, I was a bishop. I had a congregation of over 600. I was responsible for their spiritual and temporal welfare. I spent a great deal of time working with those couples and adults.

Saving marriages saves children. Divorce destroys children. Click To Tweet

Overcoming Tragedies

I’ve found over and over that there are patterns of successful relationships and there are patterns of unsuccessful relationships. Those success patterns can be taught, learned and applied. Has all of the life that my wife and I have had been easy? The answer is no. Our daughter’s first child was born with a heart defect. He had an open-heart surgery when he was eight days old. He had a second open-heart surgery when he was five months old. He died in her arms when he was eight months.

They had hoped to get another surgery to save him, and they had gotten a final answer from a medical center surgeon who said, “I can’t do that. There’s nothing I can do.” I got a call from my daughter. She said, “What am I going to do without my baby?” What do you say to that? When she brought that baby home to Florida to bury him, I remember the tiny casket and how it was so small that the boy scouts made a longboard for us with handles where we could lift the casket up.

It was a fall day in Florida. It was beautiful. The sun was shining. You can hear the birds, but it was the emptiest feeling I’ve ever had to carry that child and put that casket in the ground, and to know that my daughter was hurting and there was nothing I could do to help. Brandon had all kinds of health problems.

Fast forward several years later, she has three more healthy children, and then another one, a fifth one. That little boy was everything that Brandon was not. He was a force of nature. At two years old, he climbed up the shelving in the pantry to get to the candy that was on top and was hanging from it, hollering for someone to come and get it.

Austin was amazing. He loved like there was no tomorrow. As it turns out for him, it wasn’t, because when he was four years old, he choked to death on a grape in front of my wife, my daughter, his two older sisters, and little brother. He was four years old. For the second time in my life, I carried another grandchild to the grave. Those experiences have the potential to destroy a couple of people. Linda and I were blessed that it didn’t do that to us. We had built a deep enough well of love and trust that we leaned on each other and got closer. Did it hurt? Absolutely. Does it still hurt every day? Yeah, it does.

The Purpose Of This Podcast

Human beings have an amazing capacity to overcome tragedy. What that teaches is that we have to build sound foundations for relationships. That’s what we’re going to talk about in this show. For those of you who are single, it’s how do you identify and attract your ideal mate? For those of you who have already made the commitment of marriage, how do we make it awesome? How do we give you the relationship of your dreams? How do we help you have it?

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the one constant in every single relationship. It’s summed up in a country song that has a line in it that says, “Wherever you go, there you are.” You are the only constant in every single relationship you have ever had or will ever have. The success or failure of those relationships starts with you. I know people. I’m betting you know people who have had multiple challenges in getting along with people. It might be at work, at school, or at the same failed relationship over and over. Somehow, they cannot see that at the center of all of those problems with all of those very different people, the constant is them. That’s our starting point.

Accepting Responsibility

For every relationship, in fact, for every success in life, until you accept 100% responsibility for your life and your results, you can’t fix a problem that you can’t identify. That’s one of the fundamental problems of our society. The media, whomever or however you want to say this, are creating a victim mentality. It’s never your fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. It might be the government. It might be the other political party. It might be the education system. It’s always somebody else. The answer is it’s not. You can’t fix a problem you’re not part of. Until you are mature enough to understand and accept that you are responsible for your successes and failures, you don’t have much you can change.

Some of you have spent years trying to change the other people in your relationships. How is that working for you? Not so well would be my guess because the only person on the planet that you can change is you. Let’s start with that. How do we help you to become who you need to be? What is it about you that makes it difficult for you to form relationships or sustain them?

There’s a principle that I learned a long time ago called Self-Defeating Behaviors or SDBs. I am not telling you that this has never been a problem for me. When things are going too well, whether in a relationship, a job or a financial situation, we get uncomfortable and we self-sabotage the relationship, business or opportunity.

Until you accept 100% responsibility for your life and your results, you can't fix a problem that you can't identify. Click To Tweet

Thermostat Problem

There’s a great book called The Big Leap that I would strongly encourage all of you to read. Here’s the idea. I call it the thermostat problem. All of us have a comfort zone, and we have that physically. We say, “I love hot weather. I like it to be 85 to 95 degrees.” Somebody else is like, “I hate that. I want it to be 65 to 75 degrees.” We all have that same thing in terms of our view of what’s right for us. What it really is is a reflection of our own level of belief in what we are worthy of receiving.

Let’s say that your comfort zone is 70 to 80, and that applies to your relationship. What does that mean? It means if everything in your relationship is going great, and the man or the woman that you’re with is treating you like a king or queen, and you are fulfilled and happy, the relationship temperature gauge gets up to 82. All of a sudden, you’re like, “Something doesn’t feel right. I’m not feeling good about this.” What do you do to the great relationship that’s trying to take you to the next level? You do something to screw it up because you were outside your comfort zone.

You had to get the quality of that relationship down to where you were comfortable and what you thought you were worthy of. What do you do? Maybe you are unkind. Maybe you don’t show up when you say that you’re going to. Maybe you go out with someone else, another man and another woman. Maybe you’re unfaithful. There are a number of ways that you do it.

All of a sudden, your partner starts to pull away from you a little because they’re hurt. The temperature goes down, it’s at 82 and then it’s down to 78. You’re fine, but they’re still hurting, so they keep pulling away. All of a sudden, the temperature in your relationship is at 68. It’s below your 70 threshold. You’re like, “I’m not comfortable anymore. I don’t feel good. This hurts. My partner’s lack of attention to me hurts. I need more than this. I have to change something.”

What happens is that the pain of being outside your comfort zone on the low-end causes you to go, “I’ve got to do something to make this better.” Maybe it’s candy, some flowers or an apology. It’s something that you then take action to make the relationship better because you want to get it back to at least 70 where you’re comfortable. There are a couple of problems with that. Number one is it is a very selfish approach because what that means is you’re only in the relationship to meet your needs. You’re not in the relationship or you’re not committed to the relationship to meet your partner’s needs.

What if your goal in the relationship is to make your partner feel the love, appreciation and acceptance at a level of 100, and you focused on that every single day and not on how you felt? Think about what that relationship might look like. It could also make your partner uncomfortable. We might hit their upper limit. They might go, “I’m not worthy of 100. Let me do something to back this down to 90,” and then they want to hurt you.

This is not a conscious process. It’s the programming that’s running in the background based on all of your life experiences. What do we do? We teach ways for you to reset your thermostat. What if instead of it being set at 70 to 80, we can help reset it to where it’s 80 to 90? Ultimately, we want to get it to 100, I get it. Sometimes, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, so we’re going to take it incrementally.

If your relationship gets down to 80 or it gets at all below 80, you’re uncomfortable and you want to do something to make it better. If you keep doing those things, you and your partner will work together to get your relationship barometer raised. At some point, you’ll both get to the point where you are raving fans of each other. How many of you would leave or look for a replacement for someone who is your raving fan and that you were a raving fan of theirs? You get more committed the higher up that relationship scale goes.

Building Successful Relationships 

You have opportunities to do that. There are techniques to do those things. We’re going to talk about that in this show. We’re going to talk about the principles that underlie all successful relationships, both intimate and business. Think about business relationships. If you are a business owner, you have multiple relationships that affect your business. You have your employers, employees, possibly co-owners, vendors and customers. Those are all relationships.

What if you could take the principle of the successful relationship and apply it in every one of those categories, and increase the strength and quality of those relationships? How would that affect your business? How would that affect your job? If you’re an employee, how would that affect your value to the employer if you were improving their business, relationships, vendors, customers, and other employees? Think about what that means to your value, and your value translates into your paycheck.

One of the tools that we’re going to talk about in the show is a tool to allow you to numerically measure the quality of every relationship. It is going to help you track the progress in that calculation or quantification every single month so that you can measure the change in the quality of the relationship, and you can create a plan to make those changes.

One of the problems with relationships has always been that we’re taught a lot about goal setting. We’re always taught that the 5% of the people who set written goals and work on those written goals consistently control about 95% of the world’s wealth. It’s always been hard to set goals in the area of relationships because there’s no way to measure them. We’re always told that a goal has to be specific, measurable, and time-bound. If you can’t measure it, how do you make it a goal? How do you work on it? How do you create a plan?

We’re going to give you a tool to let you do that. We’ll spend a whole episode on exactly how you do that. A couple of the upcoming episodes are about how to identify and attract your ideal mate. That would be a great one for those of you who haven’t done that yet. Then we’re going to talk about how to measure the quality of the relationships. We’re going to talk about what are the basic building blocks of an intimate relationship. We’re going to find that those qualities and principles underlie all the relationships.

I am looking forward to spending the time with you. I want to share this information because it has happened to me. I have enjoyed a wonderful life because I have had a wonderful wife. That partnership, intimate connection, and desire to be with her have made everything that I’ve ever accomplished possible. I’ve done nothing without her. I’ve done everything with her, because of her, and for her. I want you to have the same love, joy, and passionate connection in your relationship. I’m looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of the show.

Important Links

• The Big Leap