What If You and Your Partner Did This Together?
By Jason Shelfer
Host of The Living Lucky® Podcast | LivingLucky.com
Jana and I have been doing this together for a long time.
Not always perfectly. Not always at the same table at the same time with matching journals and coordinated energy. Some mornings it’s a quick check-in over coffee before the day gets loud. Some mornings it’s separate and quiet and we reconvene afterward. Some mornings, especially during hard seasons, one of us carries the practice for both of us — not as a burden but as a kind of quiet leadership that the other one eventually steps back into.
But the intention has always been shared. And that shared intention, practiced over years, has done something to us that I don’t think either of us fully anticipated when we started.
It made us fluent in each other.
When you and your partner both practice asking what you want to experience, how you want to grow, how you’d like to contribute, and how lucky you are — separately, then together — something changes in how you see each other. You stop assuming you know what the other person wants. You start asking. You stop filling in each other’s blanks with projections built from habit and start actually listening to what’s alive in the other person right now, today, in this season of their life.
That sounds simple. It is not common.
Most couples, even good ones, even loving ones, operate on a kind of accumulated assumption. We know each other so well that we stop being curious about each other. We answer for eachother. We finish each other’s sentences in ways that feel intimate but sometimes function as a kind of foreclosure — a closing of the space where something new might have been said if someone had just paused and asked.
The practice of asking “what do you want to experience?” — genuinely, openly, as if you don’t already know the answer — is one of the most quietly radical things two people can do for a relationship.
Here is the version Jana and I have found works best, and that we’ve seen work for couples we’ve coached:
Each person answers the four questions separately first. In their own journal, in their own words, without influence from the other person’s answers. This is important. The individual practice has to remain individual — the space where you are honest with yourself before you are honest with each other. If you do it together from the start, one person’s answers tend to shape the other’s, and you lose the most valuable thing the practice produces: a genuine window into what your partner is actually experiencing, not what they think you want to hear. Then you share. Not everything — some of what comes up in a journal is private and should stay that way. But one thing from each question. What did you write for what you want to experience today? What did you write for how you’d like to grow? The conversation that follows is almost always different from the conversations you’d otherwise be having at that hour of the morning. And then, together, you both answer the fourth question. Out loud. To each other.
How lucky am I?
I cannot tell you how many times I have watched this question — asked out loud between two people who love each other, after they’ve each spent a few minutes getting honest about what they want and how they want to grow — produce something unexpected. Sometimes it’s a laugh. Sometimes it’s tears. Sometimes it’s just a long look across the table that says everything the morning hasn’t had time to say yet.
Two people who feel lucky together are formidable. Not because they don’t have hard seasons — they do. But because they have a shared language for finding their way back to what’s good, even when things are hard. They have a practice that reminds them, every morning, that they chose each other and that choice is worth celebrating.
I’ve also watched this work for people who introduce the practice solo — one partner starts, and the other eventually gets curious. That’s completely fine. You cannot force another person into a morning practice any more than you can force them into any other kind of growth. But you can model it. You can let them watch what it does to you. You can be the kind of partner who walksinto the day with intention and energy and genuine gratitude, and let that be its own invitation.
Jana has been that for me more mornings than I can count. And I hope I’ve been that for her. If your partner is resistant or skeptical or simply not interested right now, that’s okay. Do the practice for yourself. Let it change you. And if the change is compelling enough — if the person they see walking into the day starts to look different, more grounded, more alive, more intentionally present — the conversation will happen on its own.
The right question, asked at the right moment, changes everything. That’s true in a journal. And it’s true in a relationship.
If you’re both already doing the practice and you want to go deeper together — into the conversations that really matter, the dreams you haven’t said out loud yet, the version of Happily Ever After you actually want rather than the one you inherited — that’s what our Living Lucky Together course was built for. Two people choosing, on purpose, to create something extraordinary together.
Two journals at the same table is a beautiful thing. The 4-Minute Formula Journal is available on Amazon and at livinglucky.com — consider getting two. And if you want to go deeper as a couple, visit livinglucky.com to learn more about Living Lucky Together.
Why is it that when Jana and I choose to show up for ourselves and for each other everymorning, the life we’re building together keeps getting better than anything we could haveplanned?
Write your version of that. Then share it with your partner. See what they say.
Start Living Lucky® — two people who feel lucky together are one of the most powerful forces I’ve ever seen.
