What Actually Changes A Woman's Mind About Divorce?

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Transcript

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Hey Cody Butler here, and if you're watching this video, I'm assuming that your wife has asked for a divorce and it's not something that you want, you want to stop it. And after working with literally thousands of men now, I want to share with you the seven shifts that are actually required for you to voluntarily change her mind without any force, coercion, manipulation to actually get her to look at you again as somebody that she wants to be married to. So this video is gonna be for people whose wives have asked for a divorce and you don't want it. So men in this situation, they often focus on the wrong thing. And if you focus on the wrong thing, you're gonna get the wrong result, right? So what men tend to focus on is actually saving the marriage, logically, right? Changing her mind, stopping the divorce, how to actually affect the external situation. But the reality of the situation is if you want to stop divorce, then divorce is rarely, it's rarely interrupted by persuasion. A mind is very rarely, if ever, changed by argument. She's already has all of the evidence that she needs to make a decision. So no, no words are gonna change her mind at this point. If you want to change her mind, the reality is that divorce is interrupted by transformation, by personal transformation. She needs to see a new version of you. Or in other words, there needs to be a death and a resurrection of the man that you are right now. Like, I'm not saying that it's always the man's fault, but the reality of the situation is that if she's rejecting the marriage, she's rejecting the version of the man that's showing up right now. And the only way to change her mind on that is to introduce a new man into the situation. And quite frankly, if you don't look at yourself and go, I need to get better, I need to improve, I need to transform, not because there's something wrong with you, but because you have more potential in you as a human being and you're falling short of your potential, then the chances of the marriage getting saved is very, very slim. So the the fact of the matter is saving a marriage isn't a one and done situation. It's not do this or say that. Often men want tactics. They're like, tell me what to say, tell me what to do. But the truth of the matter is the reconciliation of a marriage follows a sequence of events. Transformation follows a sequence of events. You to get her to go from not trusting you, not wanting to be with you, quite frankly, probably not even liking you very much, to going, I want to spend the rest of my life with this man again. It's not like there's not one thing you can say that's gonna take her from there to there. The goal is wherever you're at in the marriage right now, maybe it's one out of ten, right? The goal is to get to two and then to three and then to four and then to five. You're not gonna go from two out of ten, the marriage collapsing to seven out of ten, we're on the mend. It just doesn't work like that. There's a sequence. And if you don't, a you don't understand the sequence, then the pro that there's gonna be no progress. And B, if you if you if you want to move too fast and skip steps in the sequence, then the pro the process is just gonna stall and you're not gonna get the result that you're actually looking for. So there are seven shifts that need to take place inside of you if you want to save this marriage. Now, the first shift shift is one of acceptance. Now, before we go any further, let me say that the process is gonna be very counterintuitive here. It's gonna feel wrong, it's gonna feel backwards because here's the reality, right? Let your experience determine what truth is. Right now, you've done everything that's intuitive, you've done everything that feels natural, you've done everything that feels right, yet here we are. So if you're gonna be a wise man, then you have to look at the situation and say, my instincts don't serve me very well. What I think is the path forward doesn't serve me very well because I've done what I think is right and it's led me to this point. So the first shift that needs to take place is there needs to be an acceptance of reality. Many men refuse to accept the fact that their wife has asked for divorce. Now, divorce. Now, let me just be very clear here. Acceptance of the situation is not resignation or you're not you're not accepting the outcome and going, I accept that this marriage is over and I accept that there's a divorce. When I say acceptance, I mean accept reality as it is, accept that the marriage is in crisis, accept that she wants a divorce, accept that you cannot change her. Many men will come to me and say, How do I, how do I make her see that she's wrong? How do I make her see all of these things? The reality of the situation is you can't, she can't, you can't change her any more than she can change, change you. And people go, Well, Cody, people don't change, people never change. No, that that simply isn't true. Let me clarify that people change, but only when they want to change. You can't change somebody, but people do change. So if your goal is to change her, good luck with that. You if your goal is to control the outcome, good luck with that. The the reality is you can't change her, but you can change yourself. You can improve, you can get better. And again, it's not that there's something wrong with you. Every day I try to improve, every day I try to get better, every day in every way I'm getting better and better, is what I say every day. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. Why? Because I have more potential than I'm realizing right now, as do you. And my challenge to you is be all you can be, become the best you can be, become the best version of yourself. Don't accept where you are. And when you actually look at yourself and go, I know I can be more, and I choose to be more, and I'm going to take action to be more. This is where transformation takes place, and this is what is going to get your wife excited about you again. So the shift here in step number one is to move from a place of resistance to acceptance. Stop resisting the fact that she wants a divorce, accept it, and this is going to put you in a very good place to move to shift number two, which is responsibility. So again, identify be say the the shift being responsibility isn't saying that you are responsible for everything that's gone wrong in this marriage. Responsibility is identifying your authority. What authority do you actually have right now? Many of us are just operating from a place of complete delusionality. We're just not operating in reality at all. It's like we think we have the ability to influence here, we think we have the ability to control, we think we have the ability to change. When actually we don't have any of those things, we have no ability to change her mind. So step number two is actually identify accurately what you can control. You're not powerless, what can you influence? You're not without influence, and what is your circle of agency? Where do you actually have the ability to influence change and make a difference? Because at the end of the day, if you if you're trying to act on a situation that you simply have no control over, if you're trying to influence somebody that refuses to be influenced, then all you're doing is you're giving away the agency that you have, you're giving away the power that you have for an idea that simply doesn't exist. And the sooner we can accept responsibility for where we are and accept responsibility for what we have the power to change, now we can start to operate in our area of influence, in our sphere of influence and control and agency, and we can actually start to make a difference. So the questions are: well, what can I actually control? What can I not control? Where do I have authority to act? Your wife is as sovereign individual as you, and she can do whatever she wants to, quite frankly. And for you to change her mind or to control the situation or to try and manipulate the situation to get her to change her mind for whatever reason, you simply don't have any authority to act here. The only thing you can do is you can present her a better option, you can present her a different path forward. Now, you have to understand there's only two reasons that your wife said yes to marrying you in the first place, and that's she loved the way that you made her feel, and she saw that and believed that a future with you was better than a future without you. Everything else falls into one of those two buckets or both of those buckets. Now, the reason she's leaving is the opposite is true. She doesn't like the way you make her feel, or she doesn't like the way she feels around you, and she doesn't see that a future with you is better than a future without you. Now, you can't change her mind about the marriage, but you can show you you can offer a better future. And how do you offer a better future? Well, that involves a better version of you. That's where you actually have the power to act, and that's where you have influence. And if you want influence over your wife, we're gonna get to that. In later stages, we get to this, right? It's like you can have everything you want in this marriage, but there is a sequence, and you do have to follow that sequence. Now, before I go on, if you want some help with this, then I do offer a I do have coaching. Uh, there's a link in the description. You can schedule a call and see if that's right for you. I don't give you everything, I can't give you everything, obviously, in these videos. I've got to hold some stuff back, and there's just if this is just not the place to give everything. But if you want the full the full coaching experience, there's a link in the description. Go ahead and grab that. So the the shift to make here, man, is to go from control to responsibility. Like stop trying to control stuff. Realize that actually the only thing you can control is yourself, the only thing that you're responsible for is yourself. And when you start to act in that, your situation will start to change. So that moves us to shift number three, which is action, right? This is what everybody wants. These are the tactics. How, how do you what do I what action do I take, Cody? Well, here's the thing: if you don't understand your agency, if you don't understand your authority, if you don't understand where you actually have influence right now, you're gonna act on the wrong areas. If you try and act on her, then you're gonna make the situation worse. If you understand that I am where I I I can change, and when I change, the marriage can change, then you can actually start to make a difference. So stop thinking, stop waiting and stop negotiating about this marriage and start taking action on yourself, right? Begin taking daily action. What do you what can I do to show her a better or not? What can I do to show her a better future? What can I do that actually provides a better future for her? What are the daily actions? What's uh what are the value-driven actions? What are the actions that I can take within the actual sphere of authority that I have? This is where your power is. So the shift here is going from knowing to doing. I can tell you she needs to see that a future with you, with with you is a better option than a future without you. Well, you can know that, but you've got to actually do it now. You've got to you've got to move into that reality. So when you do this, when you start acting in areas that you have true authority, i.e. yourself, your ability to grow, your ability to change, well, shift number four then shows up naturally because you're no longer emotionally tied to the outcome of the relationship, right? The stability starts to show up, show up, and emotional safety and emotional stability starts to emerge again within the relationship. When when you actually focus on what you can control and what the areas that you actually truly have influence over, instead of trying to control something that you simply can't, your nervous system calms down, her nervous system calms down, the desperation in you reduces, which quite frankly is not very attractive, right? A man who's desperate it just isn't a very attractive look. Your reactivity reduces, and emotional consistency within your behavior develops. Now, one of the key things that you're gonna have to do or has to happen for her to change her mind is she's running a predictive model right now. Her nervous system is predicting how you are going to react, and when you play into that prediction, you confirm her prediction that you're gonna behave this way and the marriage needs to end. The way that you start to change her mind, or the way that you start or her mind starts to change more specifically, is what she expects from you gets interrupted, and another behavior shows up, and that behavior is a desirable behavior. So when she expects you to act desperately and you do, that confirms that she's made a good decision. When she expects you to be reactive or controlling or manipulative, and you are, that confirms to her that she's made a good decision and you're playing into her predictive mechanism. When she expects you to be reactive and you're stable, then she has to evaluate whether she's made the right decision or not. There's no two ways about it. If her nervous system, her predictive mechanism, is saying he's going to behave in a way that's very unstable right now, and you show up with uh uh stability, this creates conflict within her that forces her to go, okay, I've got two realities here. My predictive mechanism is saying he's going to be reactive, but what I'm seeing with my eyes is he's being he's showing up with stability. So one of these two is wrong. If she predicts instability and you show up with instability, she doesn't need to question anything. She just needs to proceed with what she's already decided to do, which is divorce you. So the only option you have is this. You're not going to talk her into changing her mind. The only option you have to get her to reconsider is to interrupt that predictive mechanism, her nervous system, through introducing new behavior which comes through these shifts. You can't fake this, you can't fake stability. You can't pretend to be stable. She's gonna see through it. So your observable behaviors in this shift is you you become calmer, you become more patient, you become emotionally more regulated, you become predictable in your behavior in a positive way. You're no longer the monkey with a machine gun. So what happens here, and again, when I say shift, this is not shift in the marriage, this is shift inside of you. You move from a state of internal chaos to a state of internal stability. When you are stable internally, you create stability within the marriage. When you have chaos internally, you create chaos within the marriage. This is how it works. So what happens then after you emotionally stabilize is now you just naturally start to operate from a position of leadership. You you are now qualified to genuinely operate from that position of leadership, right? And that's that starts with self-leadership. So what these first four shifts really are doing, they're creating an environment of self-leadership. You're now leading yourself very positively, you're governing yourself, you're in control of your emotions, you're starting to lead your thinking instead of being led around by your thinking. You're starting to choose your thoughts, you're starting to choose your reactions, you're starting to lead your behaviors. Up to this point, a lot of this was just instinctive and coming out of you. It was inconsistent behavior and inconsistent actions governed and ruled by emotion. So the success formula that I teach with the men that I coach is success comes from consistent execution devoid of emotion. So you behave how you you behave in these ways, self-governed, self-led, etc., regardless of how you feel, regardless of what's going on in the marriage. The fail the formula for failure, men, is inconsistent execution governed by emotion. You can hold it together when things are going well, but the second she says she wants a divorce, or you get a letter from a lawyer, or something happens that that triggers you, you your emotion leads to inconsistent execution. And that inconsistent execution destroys the previous shifts and it affirms to her that a predictive mechanism is correct and to proceed with the divorce. So what's happening right now in step five is you are now effectively leading yourself. You are in a position of self-leadership, and that leadership, quite frankly, is earned. You can't just claim it or say, what do I need to do? That leadership comes out of character, that list leadership comes out of discipline, self-governance, and consistency. You can trust yourself. You know that you're going to hold it together. You are in you are choosing your reactions, you are choosing how you respond instead of just rotely reacting to the situation. So what happens here in shift number five is you've gone from being reactionary, reactionary to a position of leadership, self-leadership. But now that you have successfully led yourself, now you are in a position to lead others because guess what? Shift number six, credibility shows up. Once you've successfully managed to lead yourself, regardless of what's going on in the marriage, you've successfully shown that you're stable and emotionally grounded regardless of what's going on in the marriage. You have credibility again because guess what? Your words and your actions now align. Your yes means yes, your no means no. If you say you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it, and if you don't, you don't, right? Your promises now match your behavior. Now, again, for many of us watching this, the reason we're in the pickle that we're in right now is because our promises simply don't match our behavior. We've said one thing and we've done something else. We've promised change and we haven't. We've said we're gonna stop this behavior and we we've continued in it. We've said we're gonna start a new behavior and we've refused to do that. What we say has not aligned with what we do, which again, this is this is the problem that many men show up to me with is they want to talk their way out of a problem that they've behaved their way into. The problem is you have no credibility, you have no trust with your wife. That has to be re-established. There's only one way to do that, and that's your words and your actions have to align. And that only comes in step number six. There's no way to skip step one through five and arrive at credibility. So promises match behavior, commitments are kept. Yes means yes, no means no. So the credibility or trust is re-earned again with your wife through consistency, through repetition, through integrity, and through time. So anybody telling you that you can turn this around in four weeks or eight weeks or whatever, anyone that's promising you an outcome in a specific period of time, there's simply not, that's simply it, it's not there's no integrity in that because the reality of the situation is your wife's predictive mechanism has to be interrupted. And if you've been acting a certain way for a decade or two decades or three decades, there's no way that that's going to be turned around in a short period of time. There has to be consistency in your behavior, repetition, integrity, and time. Now, the great thing is you can turn this around through time. But one of the one of the biggest reasons that that I see that men fail in the ability in their attempt to reconcile their marriage is they just simply have unrealistic expectations in in what the time frame is going to be. They think that they can earn credibility back within a week or two weeks, or they ask me, how do I re-establish trust Cody? How do I establish credibility and how do I do that in a very short period of time? Well, that there's simply no way to do it in a short period of time. It's going to take as long as it's going to take. So the shift actually that truly happens here, man, is that we move from promises to proof, we stop making promises, and we start showing the proof. And the example I love to use here is like stop talking to your wife a wife about the fire and telling her about the fire and trying to explain to her what the heat and the warmth that you're going to put out, and just set the fire and let her stand next to it. If you actually truly have changed, if you actually truly have the credibility, you don't need to talk to your wife about the fire, you just need to let her feel the heat. If she's not feeling the heat of that fire, then the transformation simply hasn't taken place at this point. So we then get into shift number seven, which again is just a natural byproduct of the previous shifts here. This is not something that you you actively have to try to create. It is just a byproduct in the same way that if you put water in a sub-zero environment, you get iced. When you make the previous shifts that I've just explained to you, shift number seven, which is emotional safety returns. Now, men ask me all the time, can I save this marriage, Cody, and how long is it going to take? And my answer to that question is well, can you re-establish emotional safety and how long is it going to take to do that? So what we're talking about here is emotional safety is actually the byproduct of the previous six shifts that we're going to do, that we've we've just talked about here. So you become emotionally safe to your your wife when you become predictable, when you become stable, when you become draught grounded, when you become trustworthy and credible, when your words actually mean something. When you say you're going to do it, you're going to do it, your words and your actions line up. And you become non reactive to the situation. You're stronger than the situation, you're bigger than the situation. Now, ultimately, if if every time she says something that triggers you, you get reactive. The marriage is bigger than you. The marriage is controlling you, and she's not going to feel safe in that environment. You need to be bigger than the situation. And when that happens, you become a man who's safe. Now, in shift number seven, here what happens is you become the oak tree, you become the rock, you become the shelter from the storm. Whereas right now, in all honesty, you probably are the storm, which is she's looking for shelter from that storm. And the only way that she's seeing that is through separating from the marriage, divorce right now. Again, give her a better option. Right now, if she wants safety and emotional safety, and the only option for her to get that safety in her mind is to leave the marriage, then you've given her no choice. Give her another option. You can have safety within the marriage. I can be predictable, I can be stable, I can be grounded. But this takes work, right? This is working on yourself. All of these things revolve around you becoming bigger, better, and stronger, not changing the marriage or changing how she sees the marriage. So what does safety mean exactly? Well, it's people know who they're gonna get. There's nothing worse than your wife coming home or you coming home from work and opening the door, and she doesn't know who she's gonna get. She's gonna get one of three or four different versions of you. Maybe she's gonna get a really nice, friendly version if you want to have if you're hoping to have sex, you're gonna butter her up. Maybe if you've had a bad day, she's gonna get a really tired version, she's gonna get a nasty version, she's gonna get a sarcastic version. She doesn't know who she's gonna get when you show up. Safety means that it's one man, one environment. There's not two or three or four different men that can show up inside of you. One personality, one man, one egg one man, one expectation, no emotional volatility. So, again, what is that? Well, the easiest way to think about that is eggshells, no walk-in on eggshells. There's no manipulation, there's no instability. You're the rock, you're solid, you're predictable, your words and your actions line up. You have integrity, you're in a position of leadership authentically, not because you've declared it, because you've earned it. So, what this what happens in this scenario is she shifts, her nervous system shifts from an uncertainty which is to safety. Now, ultimately, the ironic thing here is both of you are looking for the same thing in the way that you're moving forward with this marriage. You're both looking for certainty. You don't like the uncertainty, which is why you're watching this video, right? You're looking for a way to reintroduce some certainty into your situation, and she doesn't like the uncertainty that you bring to the situation. The only difference between the two of you at this point is she sees that uh she wants to move from uncertainty to safety, which involves leaving the relationship. That's what she sees as the outcome. You see that this shift, uncertainty to safety, is best achieved within the relationship and stopping the divorce. So ultimately, you want the same things, you're moving in the same direction, you just see different pathways to that. But when you can see that actually what she wants is to move from uncertainty to safety, and that's what I want as well. This is why acceptance, step number one, is very, very important. Because when she sees that that safety is created from leaving the marriage, and you see that that safety is created from staying in the marriage, you you're at you're at odds with each other. What you think is the path forward is the path that she sees as the way out, if that makes sense. So by accepting the situation, you're you're in the moment given her that safety that her nervous system can now calm down and start to listen to some of the things that you have to say, right? So the sequence of events here, what are the what are the the seven shifts? So acceptance moves to responsibility, responsibility turns into action. If you take the right action, that turns into personal stability. That stability becomes leadership, that leadership creates credibility, that credibility creates safety. This is the process of reconciliation. Many men want to just jump to here, right? They want to jump straight to leadership. I want to lead this marriage. She's not going to follow an unstable man. She's not going to follow a man that doesn't take responsibility, she's not going to follow a man that doesn't accept reality as it is. She's just not going to do that. Without all of these steps, we cannot arrive at leadership, we cannot arrive at credibility, and we cannot arrive at safety. But when we do these steps and we do it because that's who we want to be, we want to be a stable man, we want to be in a position of authentic leadership. We want our words to mean something and there be consistency and congruency between our words and our actions, then she that is giving going to give you the very best opportunity for her to look at you and go, This is the man that I want to lead me. This is the man that I want to spend my life with. So the transformation that actually takes place here, man, is that most men try to save their their their marriage with the wrong focus. They're outcome-driven and they're fear-driven. You're taking you're taking action right now and you're thinking from a place of fear and loss. And all you're gonna do, like, like can only produce like. If you're in a state of fear, you can only produce more fear. If you're in a state of anxiety, you can only produce more anxiety. An orange seed is only ever going to produce an orange, a lemon seed is only ever going to produce a lemon. If you want to save your marriage, you have to get to that place of consistency and stability in that has to be found inside. Once you're internally stable, then the marriage stabilizes. Once you're internally consistent, then the marriage becomes consistent as well. So the better question is not how the the question really is not how do I save my marriage, but who who must I become to save this marriage? Who is the man who is capable of saving this marriage? So the goal here is you want to become the safest man in the room, you want to become the same man under pressure, or in any circumstance, right? One man, one every environment, and become the man your words describe. What do I mean by that? So use words. I'm I I am a stable man, I am a man who is consistent, I am a man who is emotionally independent and sovereign. I am a man who is strong enough to carry this marriage. Become the man that your words are actually described describing. So the conclusion here to take away is that transformation has an order. It's not just how do we get straight to the transformation. There's step one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I've given you the seven shifts. Every shift earns the next one. You can't skip steps here. You can't go from shift one to shift seven. You have to go through each step sequentially. Ultimately, safety is the destination. You want to become emotionally safe for your wife, and vice versa. And ultimately, the marriage may or may not survive where you're at. I don't know what you've done, I don't know what's happened, I don't know how bad the situation is. But when you do this, the transformation belongs to you regardless of the outcome. So if you want some help with this, if you want some help identifying and walking through this, again, I've got some links in the description. I do offer coaching, I do have programs available, and also have other uh resources available to you. Have Coach Cody AI that can really help you through this in a very cost effective way. And all of those links are in the description of this video. Check those out. Give us a thumbs up if you like this, subscribe, share this video, and we'll see you in the next one.