By Michaela Gordoni
Former NFL star Andrew East is sharing why he’s disciplined with his free time.
“People talk about freedom all the time,” East said in a recent podcast with his wife, Olympian Shawn Johnson, “and they want financial freedom and they want travel freedom and time freedom and freedom to do what they want, but it’s kind of paradoxical that the way most people spend their free time when they have it is scrolling through Instagram mindlessly or screen time, and a lot of times, we don’t know what to do with our freedom.”
Some people have told East that he’s too structured and takes the fun out of life. But he thinks being intentional is more important.
“My answer is I would rather over-index and over-structure on intentionality than hope that that whimsy happens,” he says.
The East family talks about a lot of important topics on their YouTube channel and podcast, such as intentional parenting and intentional dating.
They recently shared how they make goals in their life together, which helps eliminate regrets.
“You let time go by, and five years go by, and you look back, and you’re like what happened?” Shawn said. “Like why am I living in this house? Why am I still in the city? Why am I still at this job but I’m not happy with it?”
She noted that it’s very easy to let time slip by and then suddenly feel full of regrets.
“You forget you actually have things that you want to do. So it’s kind of like working on your life instead of working in your life. So when we sat down for the first time, I remember we were there for like six, seven hours. We wrote everything down with a pencil on a piece of paper. We literally just put it into categories…and we said, in five years and 10 years, what do you want this to look like?”
Related: Shawn Johnson East and Andrew East Reveal Parenting, Marriage Insights
Doing this has kept them on track together and helped changes in their lives to be smaller than they would have been if they hadn’t talked about them beforehand.
Andrew said it’s “really peace-enabling. I feel like it’s really beautiful to not have this thing that you really want but can’t achieve. It’s like, ‘No, yeah, we could definitely do this and I think it’s a little bit of being content in all situations. A little bit of knowing what’s enough.”
In another video, Shawn pointed out why statistics indicate that years five to eight of a marriage are the hardest.
She said, “The reasons why the five to eight year phase represents some of the hardest years of marriage are because small children need a lot of care and attention, and usually it’s within the five to eight year mark that you have small children.”
“It can be hard to juggle between housework,” Andrew added. It’s important for couples to plan things out and communicate during the stressful times of parenting.
It’s clear that Shawn and Andrew are doing their best to be intentional in their lives as spouses and parents.
Read Next: Shawn Johnson, Andrew East Explain How Marriage Changes Society
- Content: +2Share:
- Content: +2