Episode #1086
Most men create a vision for their business but rarely take the time to do the same for their marriage or family. In this episode, Doug and Chris unpack why that’s a problem, and how to start creating a clear, shared vision at home. This isn’t about long meetings or forcing your wife to sit on the couch and talk about feelings. It’s about finding a way that works, walking, talking, asking the right questions and using that to get aligned.
They share real examples from their own lives: how to include your kids, even if they’re young or older, how to keep it light and fun, and how small conversations can lead to big shifts. You’ll hear what worked, what didn’t, and why this kind of planning can deepen connection without pressure. Chris also opens up about his own hesitation around doing this “the right way,” and Doug offers simple tools and ideas to make it doable, not overwhelming.
They also cover how to set a vision that’s not just about logistics or calendars but about how you want your home life to feel. You’ll learn how to plan in a way that brings energy, clarity, and direction into your relationship and your role as a father. It’s not about getting it perfect it’s about leading with intention and creating a future everyone’s excited about. If your marriage or family life feels like it’s drifting, this episode will help you reset and start fresh.
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Doug Holt 0:00
Both of us want to do more date nights, individually with our kids.
Christopher Hansen 0:02
It was all about values.
Doug Holt 0:04
What we’d write, what we want more of.
Christopher Hansen 0:07
So it was the first time that we had ever done a collective vision together.
Doug Holt 0:10
If you don’t have a vision for your business, you have no direction.
Christopher Hansen 0:15
I love the idea of recording the walk.
Doug Holt 0:18
Something I think most men forget to do is get into their wife’s world.
Christopher Hansen 0:22
We need to have a proper vision.
Doug Holt 0:24
If you don’t have a vision, you’ll be living somebody else’s vision.
Doug Holt 0:40
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The TPM Show, and it’s January. So today in this episode, we’re going to talk about visioning specifically how to plan a vision with your wife and maybe even your family, what goes into it, and what you’re going to get out of it. Great topic. Chris, thanks for being here again, man.
Christopher Hansen 0:59
Absolutely. Thanks, Doug.
Doug Holt 1:00
So you brought this topic to the table, which I love, and you were saying that right now you’re in this energetic state of planning your vision or relooking at your vision anyway for 2026 and beyond.
Christopher Hansen 1:14
For sure. That’s exactly where I’m at. And just to provide some context about a year and a half ago, almost two years now we moved out here to Sisters from Columbus, Ohio, and that was on the heels of my wife and I getting very clear on our vision and what we wanted for ourselves.
To be perfectly honest, it was the first time that we had ever done a collective vision together. So we did this, got very clear on what that was, and it happened very quickly. We ended up out here in Sisters, and our entire life changed in alignment with this vision.
We haven’t done a collective vision since we’ve been out here really just getting settled in and so we’re getting ready to sit down and really talk about how to structure this next vision for our lives. What do we want?
I had a lot of takeaways from The Brotherhood Legacy Retreat this year, and one of the things that I heard Brad who was hosting the retreat say, was that it was all about values. He was talking about how he aligns specific values with different areas of his life his wife, kids and that’s really the anchor point I’m bringing forward for this next vision. It’s about values and what we agree to align with, value-wise, for myself, my wife, and including the kids in this as well.
Doug Holt 3:01
I love that. I’ve seen several men post in the community their values charts like the Holt family values. I’ve seen a lot of guys sharing them, and I love the idea. I haven’t done it with Aaron yet.
One of the things I did do, because we’ve done this version of visioning before we’ve already done it with the kids this year. My kids are young, five and eight, so they don’t totally get it, but we ask, “What do you want more of? What do you want less of? What would you like to learn?” Those kinds of things.
We write them down. The cool thing you might find this interesting is once we started doing it with the kids, I’ll tell you exactly what we did, and then the deeper part. We asked our kids, “What is it you want to learn more of? What do you want to do more of? What do you want to experience more of? How do you want this all to feel in 2026?”
They listed things out, we wrote them down, and we all sat around a candle and did this in candlelight. It was cool. I took all of that, loaded it up into Gemini Pro, and had it create an image like a family crest but more of an infographic with symbols and colors. It was really bright, and I’m going to print it out and hang it in our home so the kids can see it and remember it.
There were a lot of surprises, too. I was really taken aback my wife wants to learn Spanish. Didn’t know that. So it was a really neat thing to see.
Christopher Hansen 4:34
I love that. That’s actually really, really helpful. My kids are older, right? And one of my fears is that I haven’t set them up successfully I think every father probably feels that way in one area or another.
I’ve never done any real vision work with them. We talk about things, but we’ve never really put it on paper. Which is silly well, not silly but I understand the importance of vision, right?
Having not really sat down and translated that into something with the kids is eye-opening. I’m just kind of like, “Oh wow, this is actually something really simple we can do that brings alignment for them and gives them an anchor point.”
Doug Holt 5:34
And I think tying it in with the kids and family is really important to me. Tying it in with the kids and seeing where those crossovers are, right? We took my kids to Hawaii not too long ago, and they want to go back to Hawaii. They’ve been fortunate to go to places all over the world at a very young age, but that’s the place they keep talking about. So it’s like, cool, okay, we can make another Hawaii trip happen or something along those lines.
My son wants to get better at Jiu Jitsu. My daughter wants to get better at reading. And so just seeing that as a father, I think, okay, how can I tie these in? We can buy a Jiu Jitsu mat to roll out and practice together. I can sit down with my daughter and read with her more at night. We do these things already, but I’d rather invest my time and money into what they’re passionate about right now.
And then, how can I tie this into my wife’s desire to learn Spanish? Well, I took Spanish for five years. Don’t remember a lot of it, but cool I want to learn Spanish. So let’s make a trip that involves these things and rope them all in.
Christopher Hansen 6:40
I love that. I love the crossover.
Doug Holt 6:40
There’s not always going to be crossover, and that’s okay too. I think a lot of times, Chris, when I do this with men, we forget that my goals can be my goals, my wife’s goals can be her goals, and then we can have a third set of goals that are ours collectively.
Like you’re talking about with that vision I went out and bought Jesse Itzler’s Big Ass Calendar, and so Aaron and I are going to have a date night to plan it. It’s just a giant calendar, more like the way he does his program with sticky notes, but I’ve done something similar before I found out about his stuff.
What I’m going to do with his calendar I just wanted a big calendar is plan out our year. When am I leading retreats? Block those off. When do the kids have spring break and holidays? Put those in a different color. When’s my wife leading retreats for women? Block those off.
Okay, now let’s look at the calendar. At the end of the year this is something you could do with Kristen you pop a bottle of champagne. What are we celebrating? Looking back, what were the moments we laughed the most? What was most important to us?
For my wife, it’s family trips. Super important. That could mean camping in a tent or staying at a five-star resort she just wants family trips. So now we’re going to think about those moments and work backward. What does that look like? How can we fit those in?
If we can’t do a big trip because there are too many events, can we do a two-day trip to the Oregon Coast? And then start filling the calendar until you can say, “Wow, this is a doable plan that we actually want.” It’s visual, and it’s fun.
Christopher Hansen 8:35
I love that. That’s really cool. My brain is processing and going, “What’s coming up for me is that this actually sounds like fun,” right? It takes the pressure off the idea of jumping in. I’m a perfectionist, so I always want to do it right. I love that idea. I love the big calendar. That’s cool.
Doug Holt 9:03
Man, finance meetings used to be like board meetings with my wife they always ended up in fights. Vision meetings, when I try to do visioning my way, don’t work out. What I’ve found works best is going for a walk and recording it or taking notes like, “Oh yeah,” and kind of getting into that childlike energy.
I’ll say, “Hey, imagine it’s January 1, 2027. We pop a $1,000 bottle of champagne, and we’re celebrating. We’re looking back at the year going, ‘Holy cow, what an amazing year.’” Then I ask, “What were your top three moments from this year?”
Then I wait for my wife’s response and lead her into it. If she says, “I don’t know,” I’ll say, “I don’t know either, but what if we did? What would that look like? What kind of trips would we take as a family?”
Have a few things prepared ChatGPT is great for that kind of stuff to help spark ideas. It really gets her into that playful mode. For me, walking is disarming it’s not serious. You can have a relaxed conversation.
Ask things like, “What kind of places do we want to visit? What new things do you want to learn? What new experiences do you want to have? What do you want to do with the kids?”
One of the things that came out of our talks was that both of us want to do more date nights individually with our kids. Cool let’s make that work. Let’s pick a day where I take my daughter out, you take our son out, and then switch the next week. That way, we both have more one-on-one time with the kids.
Christopher Hansen 10:46
I love the idea of recording the walk. My wife and I walk a lot, and that’s a lot of our connection time just walking around the neighborhood. Because it is disarming.
Doug Holt 10:58
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Christopher Hansen 11:51
And it kind of keeps your brain occupied. For me, it’s really easy to connect with her while we’re moving walking or driving. It’s a little harder on the couch, and I think that was one of the biggest challenges I faced the last time I tried to do this. It took me a few attempts to bridge the gap with her in getting an aligned vision, and I was definitely trying to do it my way. You know, we’re sitting down on the couch, all the pressure of the world “What do you want?” so I love that approach.
Doug Holt 12:25
What are your KPIs going to be related to our family?
Christopher Hansen 12:31
(laughs) So that’s good, that’s really good advice. I love that. I’m curious for the listeners what’s your perspective on vision? Why do you think that as men, we need to have a proper vision? I mean, I think a lot of these guys probably do this type of planning in business, right? If they’re successful, I imagine they do. But I think fewer of them do it with their family.
Doug Holt 13:10
I’m going to bet you’re right certainly not in the way we’re talking about. So why is it important to have a vision for your family or your marriage?
If you don’t have a vision for your business, you have no direction. You don’t have a target; therefore, you can’t create a map to get there. You’re just hoping you wander into success which rarely happens and if it does, you won’t stay there. Same thing with a marriage: you need a vision so you have a destination.
Where do we want to go? Because if you don’t know what you want, you’ll just pick up somebody else’s stuff along the way.
I once heard a story where a seminar leader asked the group to create a vision. A woman in the front row said, “I don’t have one.” So he said, “Okay, picture a large estate with a vineyard,” and described it in detail. Then he said, “That’s my dream. Now you can go do it.” In other words, if you don’t have your own vision, you’ll end up living someone else’s.
So yes, you need a vision for your marriage and for your family. That gives you a goal and a destination. Another reason it’s important: you might find your wife wants to go left while you want to go right. You better get on the same page quickly, or you’re going to be splitting up.
You get alignment, and then you have something you’re working toward together. Whenever I work on something with my wife, it brings us closer always. If you have a common goal and mission, just like we do in business, it connects you.
At TPM, we have a shared mission to help men. That same principle applies in marriage and family. And the more you include the kids, the better. My kids are young, so the next step for me is teaching them goal setting. They’re not quite old enough to really understand goals, but we start with vision.
We’ll create vision boards where they cut out magazine pictures. It helps them realize that they can think about what they want and desire, and then we can backtrack with action steps to get there.
It builds confidence. My daughter, for example, wants more stuffed animals. Great. Those cost money. Sure, Dad can buy them but if she wants more, we talk about how she can earn them. “What are some ways you can make money?” I tell her, “You make money by providing value in the world.” That’s a whole new conversation.
Aaron and I talk about this often. I’m very fortunate to have a wife like yours tuned in and growth-oriented. We talk about what we want more of instead of focusing on the gaps. What do we want more of?
Okay, we want more spicy sex. Cool. What does that mean to you? Because it might mean something different to me. Then we start talking it gets fun. We’ve got two young kids, so we ask, “Where’s the practicality?” We don’t have family nearby or babysitters. How are we going to sneak in these romantic interludes more frequently?
Our kids are getting older, and soon they’ll start noticing that Mom and Dad are taking a lot of “naps.” What’s going on? They lock the door! (laughs) But that creates a fun vision something we can both live into.
And it allows me to do something most men forget: get into my wife’s world. I learned this the hard way. Now I know what books she’s reading. I even have a custom GPT that, when I plug in a book title, tells me about the story and gives me thought-provoking questions to ask.
So I can say, “Hey, I saw you reading this book, and the protagonist did this what did you think about that?” She knows what I’m doing, but she loves it, because she gets to talk about something she’s passionate about. It’s alignment it’s connection and it all ties back to having a shared vision.
Christopher Hansen 18:06
I was talking with Coltyn about this earlier. This time of year January most people are setting New Year’s resolutions. I don’t really set resolutions; they’ve never worked for me. But typically around late January or early February, I start to feel really motivated excited about what this year’s going to look like for me.
It’s one of my favorite times of year, because it’s a growth season. We’re heading into spring, and it’s exciting. I appreciate these tips too, because I do have some nerves around navigating this.
Doug Holt 18:55
I think we all do, man. This conversation reminds me Aaron and I don’t even have our “fill the calendar” date scheduled yet. It’s something we still need to decide. We’re going skiing this weekend here in Sisters, so we’re figuring that out.
The key is just having the conversation and making it fun. People get anti–New Year’s planning, but in business, we don’t do that. We plan out the year Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
There’s a great book called The 90-Day Year. It’s about taking a big vision and breaking it down so you don’t wait until the end. Same concept applies here.
If my wife and I say we want more “spice” in the bedroom, that’s fine but it’s vague. So how do we create urgency and structure around it? That’s one way to move from dreaming to doing.
I love it, man. Awesome conversation, brother. Good luck I’d love to hear how your vision turns out.
Christopher Hansen 20:15
Thanks, for sure. I’ll share it with you.
Doug Holt 20:17
Guys, as I always say, in the moment of insight, take massive action.
If you don’t have a vision for yourself, your marriage, and your family, then you’re rudderless just hoping to land in safe harbor. That’s not a good situation to be in, boys.
There’s a reason our program is called The Activation Method. It’s a methodology. And just like a methodology, a vision needs a method behind it otherwise, it’s just a dream.
There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, but be honest with yourself: it’s whimsical. That’s fine. But if you actually want to reach your destination, you need a clear vision of where that is and a plan to get there.
So take action, and we’ll see you next time on The TPM Show.