Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: The Formula For STRONG Relationships, With Kathryn Gordon Relationship Expert & Best Selling Author
Tue, 07 Jan 2025
In This Episode You Will Learn About: Being vulnerable in your relationships Communication tips for reconnecting Valuing yourself & the people around you Resources: Website: kathrynforreal.com Read Relationship Grit Listen to Kathryn For Real Instagram: @kathryngordon Download the FREE Relationship Grit Action Plan Get 10% off your first Mitopure order at timeline.com/CONFIDENCE. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553! Visit heathermonahan.com Reach out to me on Instagram & LinkedIn Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/ Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Show Notes: Are you putting your relationships on the backburner ? If YES, you are NOT alone! Relationship expert Kathryn Gordon is here to help us all become our best selves while dating and maintaining our relationships. Kathryn encourages looking at the people in your life as teammates, NOT competitors! If you can learn how to open up and be your TRUE self, you can allow others in, and feel loved and supported. These principles and practices Kathryn shares are for more than just romantic relationships, and will help you deepen your connections in more ways than one. Start taking your relationships to the next level today!
Chapter 1: What should come first in your relationships?
Your relationship should come first. And so many times it's your coworkers and your children and your friends, everybody else gets the best of you. And then your partner gets what's left. No, it should be the other way around. Let's remember when you get into a relationship, you're also bringing in all your past hurts, all your past experiences.
You can make your relationship everything you always wanted it to be. It's vulnerability, communication. It's all the things we talk about. It's grit.
Chapter 2: How can vulnerability improve your relationship?
Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up.
Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest today, Catherine Gordon.
Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from blind dates?
She's a wife, a mother, businesswoman, movie producer, best-selling author of Relationship Grit, and host of the Catherine For Real podcast. A graduate of Old Dominion University, Catherine became a top producer in sales for several companies before deciding to follow her passion as an actress and model.
After the birth of her children, she focused on raising them and helping operate her husband's growing speaking business. and consulting business. That's an understatement.
With her children off to college, she has returned for her second act, investing in real estate and movies, mentoring women, including your girl right here, supporting several charities, writing and speaking to audiences about the keys to a great relationship and loves. Sharing the truth on her podcast, Catherine Forreal. She's my girl. She's the best. Catherine, thanks for being here.
Heather, I'm so glad to be here with you. You're so awesome.
Oh my gosh. Right back at you. I'm so excited. So, all right. I want to jump right into this guys. I have never talked about this on the podcast before. So this is going to be straight out of my comfort zone. That's why I needed Catherine to be here with me. So I very rarely talk about my personal life.
I very rarely am excited about my personal life because frankly, I don't meet a lot of great guys. However, I I was set up by an incredible person on a blind date and I was more nervous and caring about this date than ever that I ever remember in my life. And Catherine was holding my hand through the whole process and helping me get so ready.
And Catherine, the difference that you made for me and helped setting me up for success and that date up for success was something so powerful. I wanted to share it with my listeners.
Yeah. I'm glad it was, it was meant to be. I mean, we just happened to talk at that right time and I'm like, Heather, have you read my book?
Oh my gosh. And guys, so many people will say that to me. Oh, you should just read this book, read this book. This literally, I dropped everything and went and read Relationship Brit immediately. It's such an easy read. I read it in, I think it was two hours, right? It's not hard to read. The format, number one, is super cool.
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Chapter 4: Why is communication essential in relationships?
Chapter 5: What are the signs of competition in a relationship?
I have a story about that. And so John and I, I think our children were in middle school. John was traveling all the time. He He was speaking all over the country. Everybody thought he was so great. I'm at home. The kids are fighting. I'm running them to sports all the time. It was a really stressful time for me. So one particular day, John walks into the kitchen.
The kids are running late for school. I'm trying to make lunches. I'm in a nightgown. My hair is disheveled. And he looked so handsome. And this feeling came over me, a feeling of jealousy, a feeling of insecurity. And I wanted to cut him down. At that moment, I wanted to point out just one thing about him that would make him feel bad. And that's when it hit me like, uh-uh. Just compliment him.
And I turned around and I was like, John Gordon, you look so handsome in that suit. You better be careful. Those ladies are going to be chasing after you. And the funniest thing happened. He got this look on his face and this big smile. And I realized right then, not only did it make him feel good, but it kind of like disarmed me. It took away that feeling of jealousy.
And I realized like, you know what? I need to start complimenting him. And the more I did it, the easier it got. That's the other thing you'll start to notice. The more you start doing these things, these principles and practices, you know, complimenting, reminding, you know, each other that you're on the same team, it gets easier and easier to do. It becomes, you know, a part of who you are.
Who doesn't want to be giving of kindness and giving of praise of a person that you're in a relationship with? It makes all the sense in the world, but to your point earlier, if you haven't seen that modeled for you or those aren't the relationships you've been in, at first, making the transition, it does feel a little uncomfortable.
How do you get people to break through that uncomfortable moment?
Well, I mean, I think you need to ask yourself the question, do you love this person? Do you wanna make the relationship work? And sometimes it boils down to, we need to make sure we're also modeling good relationships and behavior for our children. I mean, I talk about in the book, I mean, I came from an alcoholic family and it was a very volatile upbringing.
I mean, my parents loved me dearly, but they were alcoholics. But I can tell you what, my boyfriends were all womanizing guys who were physically abusive. And that was what I learned. That was what I knew until I started to work on myself and realized that I needed to break this chain. And it's never too late. And that was a time before you met John, you were doing that work. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. You know, by the time I met John and that's why I say, you know, I did a lot of my relationship work when I wasn't in a relationship. I got out of a very narcissistic, I was dating a very narcissistic, abusive guy, not physically, but definitely emotionally and spiritually, um, And mentally.
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Chapter 6: How can compliments strengthen your connection?
And he noticed, you know, and I thought, oh my gosh, that is like a million dollar testimony. You know, like I love that. So it doesn't matter where you are in your relationship and it doesn't matter how old you are. You can start today, make a change. Like the minute you start thinking something negative or, you know, you want to, you want to lash out, think about it.
Maybe come out with a compliment instead.
To hear that you're able to impact people with these principles. And one of the reasons I think that the book resonated so well is not only were you so vulnerable in sharing these difficult moments for you, but John also was to see both of you so incredibly raw. It was shocking for me at first when I was reading it.
That was something that we talked a lot about because we knew what ended up happening. And the reason I wanted to write this book is I kept running into women at the grocery store for some reason. And they would share their story of, you know, they were split from their husband or, you know, they were leaving him. Just there was a lot of that happening in my community.
And I found myself asking them the same questions over and over. Well, did you talk to him about that? I mean, very basic questions, Heather. But see, that's what happens. Life happens. And when you're in it, it was basic communication that wasn't happening. And the more I started to see this is when I realized I went home and I said, John, I really feel like we need to show people.
Because let me tell you something. If John and I can stay together and have the type of relationship that we have now, which is amazing now, anybody can do it. I mean, we were definitely not connected. He was very stressed out with the businesses. I was stressed out with it. It was complete disconnect.
And we were able to build our relationship back, starting with a strong foundation, like really starting that. with his story, especially because when we ended up writing this, John was already a best-selling author and speaker and people know him and knew him as the guy that was, you know, all about positivity and leadership.
And then to read the story of him as this miserable, negative, mean guy was hard. It was funny. His brother read the manuscript before we sent it to the publisher. And he was like, John, you can't get this out there. And God blessed my husband. He said, you know what? That's the reason that I need to get it out there.
Because if I could come from the place of negativity that I was in, anybody can do this. Anybody can improve their relationship. And so the book, as you've read, it goes back and forth. It's John's side of the story and my side of the story. And we kind of go back and forth. And that was how we wrote the book. People always ask, like, how'd you guys write it?
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Chapter 7: What are effective practices for maintaining relationships?
Chapter 8: How can understanding past relationships help you?
So bringing God into your relationship. And then the R is resolve. You have to resolve to work on your relationship, to stick it out. You know, so many times you, and I'm guilty of this. I've been in a relationship, I'm out, you know, just, you know, check out because it's not going the way I like it. Or a lot of it I think is It's ego, but it's really the fear of being hurt, right? Oh, for sure.
Yep. So then you want to check out. No, because the grass is not always greener most of the time. I won't say always, but most of the time. My caveat with that is this. If someone is being physically abusive or something like that, that's a different story. You don't need to stay in the relationship. But if you're just having problems, money...
whose job is it to do, you know, whatever that is, you can work it out. You really can, if you love each other. Now, I will say that, you know, like when I was having problems with John, but he was, you know, and he was talking to me that way, I didn't want to really connect with him as much. But let me tell you, you know, when you change that, it changes your heart.
And so a lot of that passion, like people will say, we don't have passion anymore. Well, Well, of course you don't, right? You're mad at each other or you're stressed, but it's really a wonderful thing when you can alleviate that and find ways to be a team, how much you have passion again. So I always say like, before you throw in the towel, do these things first.
So anyway, the next letter is I, which is invest. Invest in your relationship. We were talking about this a little earlier. So many times we invest in our coworkers, we invest in our career, we invest in our children. Who gets the last of that? Our most significant person, you know, the person we love the most. So making them a priority, making them number one. And then the last is together.
And I know that sounds like, of course, but no, there's no I in team, right? It's we, we are a team together, do it together. And it doesn't always mean that it has to be 50-50. Sometimes I'm given 80% and John's given 20. Sometimes it's the other way around, but we're always working towards the same thing. So do it together. And that's the grit, G-R-I-T.
You brought up earlier that our children are seeing us model these relationships. So for everyone listening right now, if you do have kids, gosh, take the time to read this book. Take the time to apply these principles to your life and take a moment to think, are you leading a life and relationship that you want to pass and have your kids emulate? Because
I don't think we think about that all the time when we're in the grind and running through the day and getting stressed out and dropping the ball on things. If you take a moment to really ask yourself that question, is the relationship you're living in right now one that you want your children to emulate? I think that that can be really powerful.
Yeah, but modeling good relationships. And guess what? Like I said before, I didn't see that in my own family with my parents. And so that's what I stepped into. So it is very important. And you know what? It has taught our children because of the family meetings. It's taught our children how to communicate with others, just in general, with their friends, with their teachers.
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