Fair Play: how to divvy up the domestic load (Eve Rodsky Part 1)

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Eve Rodsky is a Harvard trained organizational management consultant. She's a very successful career woman in a happy marriage with a loving husband who fully respects and supports her career in every way. After Eve and her husband had children, she found herself in the same situation that many of us do around the world.

0:52 Women who are trying to maintain a career while also picking up the lion's share of the domestic load is like the mental load, the second shift, the invisible labor. These aren't new to us. Many of us know those experiences all too well. But rather than accept the status quo or walk out of her marriage, Eve decided that she could apply her organizational management skills to the problem, and she asked the simple but profound question, what would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations. The result was fair Play. Fair Play is a system that Eve has come up with. It is a time saving, anxiety saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. It became a New York Times best selling book. It was picked by Reese Witherspoon for the Hello Sunshine Book Club. And it's a card game.

1:50 It is essentially a gamified life management system that will help couples rebalance domestic workload, reimagine their relationship, and it is truly genius in my opinion. I am so thrilled that Eve has agreed to do two interviews with me on the Crappy to Happy podcast, because after you have mastered the fair Play system to free up your time, I know that you will want to hear about Unicorn space, which is the term that Eve gives to that place where you can find your creative self expression and true fulfillment. But first let's talk about fair Play. Here's Eve, Eve Rodsky. It is such a pleasure to have you on the Crappy to Happy podcast. Thank you so much for making the time to be with us.

2:34 Oh, thanks, Cas, I'm so happy to be here. Ev I first came across your work when I found your book Unicorn Space, Find Your Unicorn Space, which is about women cultivating their creative self expression in the world, which is a topic that I absolutely love. But what I soon realized was that this book came about on the back of some previous work you had done and a previous book that you had written called fair Play. So I really wanted to start with that, which is the concept of basically the unequal division of labor in most heterosexual households. Such an important topic. Can we please just start with you telling me about fair Play and how that work came about for you?

3:18 Thanks? Kas, I mean, you know, in my third grade what do you want to be when you grow up? Board? It definitely didn't have gender division of labor specialists. I think it probably had like astronaut. I don't know, but you know what happened to me ten years ago really put me on this trajectory of fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. And that was a text my husband Seth sent me that said, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries and you really can't make this stuff up. But what I can help you do is understand the headspace I was in when I got my I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries text because that overwhelmed and boredom, the two most popular words that women have been reporting to me in my research that they feel, especially during a pandemic, was very much present in my life. Ten years ago, I just had had my second son, Ben Cass and I had Zach, who was three at the time. I'd been married for about ten years, a little under ten years at the time, and we were three years into parenting.

4:25 And what I remember about that day, three years in was just the overwhelm of having two kids under three, having a baby back home. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag in my car. I remember when I'm getting seth Tex, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. As I'm driving, so I am already texting and driving gives her a newborn baby to return in the back. I had opted out of the traditional workforce. Now I say forced out if any woman who was in the corporate workforce, whether it's in Australia, New Zealand, America, seventeen countries that I interviewed. Any single woman I spoke to had a reason they were forced out. So now I say forced out. I was forced out of the traditional workforce.

5:09 So I had started my own law firm, had a client contract in my lap, and I remember every time I would hit the brakes casts, this pen that was in between my legs as I was marking up this contract would sort of sneak up and stab me in the vagina. That's what I remember. I just remember being stabbed in the vagina by a pen getting seths. I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries texts to the point where that I was late to pick up Zach, my older son, at his toddler transition program because in America we don't have universal childcare. Those programs last seven minutes and they cost your entire salary. And I know same thing for you. I know I've spoken to many women in your neck of the woods who report similar childcare dearths. And I remember that day thinking, I'm here on the side of the road, crying, crying over resentment, overwhelmed boredom, being defined as the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs when this was not supposed to happen to me, Cas I was supposed to have a fair and equal marriage. I'm a product of a single mother. As soon as I became her parental child and helped her with late utility bills and eviction notices, I said I would have an equal partner.

6:26 This would not be my life. I'm a Harvard trade mediator, I'm literally trained in difficult conversations. And still I didn't have a community. I didn't have you. I had myself alone, isolated on the side of the road, thinking this is not the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have. And that was probably one of the lowest points in my life. And that is what you have just described. Everybody listening, women listening, mother's listening will relate one hundred percent. I can relate to that story. And the thing is, Ryan, you did have what you considered to be a very equal marriage, equal partnership until children came along. Would that be fair to say.

7:10 One hundred percent? We were supportive of each other's careers. Seth would do the dishes, I would order in the pizza. He would mark up, you know, an offer letter for me as I was looking for a new job. We were really equitable cass and it was I think the reason why I was called to this work is because I think I'm I'm like the ghost of Christmas future, that this idea that I was so shocked and surprised by this, the assumptions for myself. You know, I'm not here to say I wasn't complicit in my own oppression. I one hundred percent was. But the surprise, you overwhelm, the sadness, the isolation, all of these things that I had never heard about, because probably the only resource of my life was what to expect when you're expecting. And I knew my child was going to be a jellybean size, but I had no idea what to expect when I was expecting. And I wish, I wish that someone had just said, this is the statistics. This may not happen to you if you're lucky, great, but it probably will, and so you might as well get ahead of it so that you're not in this place of resentment and overwhelm and all these other decisions that are made for us that actually are made out of fear, out of reaction, out of overwhelm, out of exhaustion, that may not be the best decisions for us as women in the long term.

8:43 And so you got the text about the blueberries Eve and then what happened. Well, I like to say, you know, I think of my work as an evolution and so at first, and my mother, she's a professor of social change, I will say that I have her in my background. Always justice and fairness was always the value, the guiding values of her work in her life, and she's always say to me, the way to change is from pre consciousness to consciousness, and then you can fight for solutions. But you can't go from pre consciousness to solutions. You know, you have to really wake up, because if you're pre conscious, you don't think you need the solutions, and then what's the point of the solutions. They sit, they're unused. So for me it was the waking up, and the waking up cast was really probably about a year long process of just starting to be aware of what was happening around me.

9:35 I write about the day I realized this wasn't just an Eve problem. When I was at a breast cancer march. My friend was newly diagnosed and we had ten women with us, and what was interesting about that day was they were all like titans of their industry, very very powerful women CEOs oscar winning producer. It just happened to be her friends were very titans of industry. And I remember this morning of having this true girlfriend's getaway. It was a Saturday morning. We were there for her. We were in pink clothes and carrying signs. And what was so interesting about that day was how at noon, all of these smart, strong women they turned into pumpkins like Cinderella with me where we had this reservation for lunch after the march, and noon came and all of these texts and emails sort of flooding in casts. We weren't all married to men, but the ones that were, we got overwhelmed with when are you coming home from the parade?

10:36 That was one of my favorite. Where's Hudson's soccer bag? You didn't leave me the address of the birthday party? And did you even get a gift? My favorite was my friend Kate's husband, do the kids need to eat lunch? And I think what was so hard about that day but transformative for me, was two things. One the recognition that all the women who use their voice in every other area of their life all said to me, we left our partners with too much to do. They all left me, didn't have lunch with me, and said I'm going to go home to bring a perfectly rap gift to a birthday party, to find Hudson's soccer bag, you know, and to feed their kids lunch. That was the first realization.

11:21 The second was just the enormity of what it takes to run a household, even for three hours that we were gone. And so I counted up how many phone calls and texts we had received. Thirty phone calls, forty six texts for ten women over thirty minutes. That was my first act of resistance, cass of understanding that this was not just a one off, that this was happening to those around us as well. And again I remember getting those texts myself. I remember getting those texts, so those phone calls when I would literally walk to the corner store, which was my one outing. And I've talked about this before on the podcast, talking about you know, life after having a baby and the pressures of that. I think it's one of our most listened to episodes and it's the one that I get the most feedback on. When we talked on this show, about being broken by the expectations put on us after we have children. We all, I think realize, like everybody listening to this show can relate. We all get well.

12:30 First of all, let's talk about invisible invisible labor, because it's not just like doing the things, is it. It's thinking of the things. That's the other pressure that's on women. My husband, bless him, would say to me, I'm here to help. Just tell me what I need to do. Just tell me what I need to do. I don't want to have to think about what you need to do. So before you're so overwhelmed, just get help, or you're doing all these unnecessary things. Right, it's just devaluing and devaluing in death by a thousand cuts cat right. So we understand the problem, and I think we increasingly understand the problem. We at a loss to on what to do about it. But you would driven too. Vonda's solution to this.

13:14 Yeah, that was I had to It was for me. It was otherwise I was creating the exact same patterns you know of my mother's life. And again I saw very limited options. I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have Crappy to Happy, I didn't have you with an episode that says, Wow, someone else, there is someone else out there is broken there? It was. It was different. We didn't even have iPads back then. It was just the first year iPads were coming out. So technology ten years ago was very different, and so I was so isolated, and so for me, the only choices I really had were to either leave my marriage because one of my friends said to me, well, if you're so fed up, three words can solve your problem. And I was like, great, I was hanging on every word. What are those three words?

14:04 And she said, court ordered custody, And so I said, okay, that's right. You know that is that will force a partner to take their custody, to have to hold the cards. That's the metaphor now affair play. But for me, it was understanding that instead of doing that, I first wanted to get my ass in gear and I became my own client casts because my day job is I create systems for very highly complex families that look like our HBO show Succession. I don't know if it's there or to you yet. I just started watching it. Yes, so it's you know, it's triggering for me. I could literally write weirder, even weirder plot points. But what I do for those families is I create grace and humor and generosity around the most difficult family decisions, operational decisions, and financial decision. And so when I started to think about systems, I did the first most logical thing that didn't work. That was to create a list. I created the Shit I Do spreadsheet, which had ninety eight tabs.

15:14 It was my first attempt at a community. We had Facebook back then, it was sort of early. I was disseminating this version of a spreadsheet early we had blackberries back then, texting people asking them what do you do that takes more than two minutes of your time? Because what I was understanding was that there are same shit different decade. We've been talking about this for one hundred years. Women's shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family. We call it mental load. We've called it the second shift, we've called it emotional labor. But you're right, Cas. Invisible work was my favorite term, coined in nineteen eighty six by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels, because you I could just it was duh if it's invisible work. Just make it visible and you will solve the problem. So I did that. I spent nine months sourcing the Shit I Do spreadsheet. It had ninety eight tabs, two thousand items of invisible work, all the way down to the medical and healthy living tab.

16:17 When someone said, well, I don't see sunscreen on there, I'm like, well, then you don't know how to use Excel. You better scroll down to item seventeen because then you'll see sunscreen. You'll see two minutes for the application and thirty minutes for the chase. And it was that granular. I sent it off to Seth so excited because I finally made the invisible visible. This amazing community of women had helped me. And I don't get a response from him. Cast I don't even get words. I get a pixelated monkey emoji that basically said I don't want to see this. A see no evil other homes. This woman, you can't make this stuff up called me and said, hey, Eve, I received your spreadsheet. It was really helpful. I'm just calling to let you know I'm not going to stay in my marriage. I was like, oh God, so this is where when you bring consciousness, but you don't necessarily have a solution, yet it can actually be dangerous because it can lead to people feeling hopeless, which is never a place I wanted to So what did I do nest next? When I realized lists alone don't work, that women have been making lists for one hundred years, I realized that the only other thing I could do was ask the question that I ask of my clients, and that question, the most important question I've ever asked in the past ten years, is what would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations, not corporations.

17:44 Some people mislabel me, not here for the capitalist patriarchy. I'm talking about organizations. When you do that, I would ask it over and over again. I remember one man said to me, Oh, Eve, you mean like my house where we wait to decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. And I said to him, yes, that, but the opposite, whatever that is that's happening in your home, I want you to do the exact opposite. And what I realized was that most people were living a figure it out philosophy, which is highly dangerous. And so when I could get to the bottom of what you asked. This is a long answer to get to your question of how did I understand that there was an organizational solution to this problem.

18:29 It's because I realized that there were more steps in execution. So it was when I started to ask the next most important question I've asked in ten years, which was how did mustard get in your refrigerator? I asked that in seventeen countries cass and in hetero cisgender couples, which is what I'm focusing on now because that's where all of our norms and problems come from. In heterosisgender couples, it was the same. It didn't matter if you were in Norway, Sweden. It didn't look different. There didn't look different if you were in mainland China or Japan or Australia, or whether it was Melbourne or Perth or Sydney. What I was seeing was women kept reporting that they were the one noticing their second son, Johnny likes yellow mustard, otherwise he won't eat his protein. It was women doing that stage, which is called conception in the project management world.

19:26 And then I would hear oh yeah, And then of course, after I know Johnny needs it. I monitored the mustard for when it's running low, and I get stakeholder buy in from my family for what they need from the list. I didn't say that exactly, but that's what I'm listening for. That's planning. That's another stage that we get paid the big bucks for in the organizational management world. And then I would hear, oh yeah, and then my partner goes to the store and he brings home spicy dijon every time. And you know, if I asked for yellow mustard and so so you want me to trust him with my living will, well, the loser can't even bring home the right type of mustard. And so, once I realized that when conception and planning is broken up from execution, that's very very bad. That's a red flag in any organization.

20:20 It's the opposite of psychological safety. It's the opposite of a corporations are doing today, which is called the directly responsible individual. And so when I realized that motivation came from keeping the ownership mindset, the conception, planning, and execution together, I realized I was onto something that I can actually create a system where there could be real actionable change in people's homes. Which is amazing and I absolutely love this. And I was just thinking as you were talking then that when that guy brings home the spicy mustard or he you know, when that execution isn't carried out and we as women who have done everything else and he still can't get it wrong, Like it's not only so incredibly frustrating for us, but it's also really then he feels devalued, unappreciated. So it just sets up this hostility and conflict in relationships, doesn't it, Like we can see how relationships get to breaking point because of this problem. All the best intentions in the world and we're just still butting heads.

21:31 Well, you're right, cast because really what you're saying is the two most important words that any healthy organization can have are accountability and trust. So when people started to say to me, I can't trust my partner to go to the store for the right type of mustard, even though and then they're not a I can't hold them accountable because I can't even have them, you know, do my living will because they would never do it on time, they wouldn't get it done right. When you start hearing those things, the home is so dangerous because it presents so small as in off season blueberries or the mustard. But really what's happening is when your organization loses accountability and trust, it's the end. It's the end of that organization.

22:19 So then where did you go? So what happens next? Well, once I understood that the ownership mindset was something that really could could work, we started to apply it to our home and it didn't work. Really because I was the first beta tester, it didn't work. What happened was we started to divide up the shit I do spreadsheet, which became the fair Play cards. There's one hundred cards. It's their actual cards, but it's also a metaphor and fifty or there's sixty if you don't have children. You add forty if you have kids, so again as the ghost of Christmas future, you may decide not to have them after I tell you that forty extra cards. But it wasn't working because what happened was I forgot the most important thing about a system cast, which is that you need onboarding, you need buy in to the system. So instead of writing that in yet remember this is the early days of beta testing, I just started the ownership mindset where I said to Seth, you have garbage. And then he understood that CPE of garbage meant that it would include the diaper pail, that it would include the little bins all over the house, that it would include putting the liner back in. The liner goes back in very important, and that again the liner goes back in. But what was happening was so

23:52 Seth really liked this idea. Okay, I can own the whole thing. I understand the expectations, the CP and E that goes into garbage. So what happened Cass was I was his garbage shadow. I could not let go because our accountability and trust had been so low that just jumping into who does what wasn't working. And he was watching me. He was watching me stand over him and stare at the garbage and put the liner by the sink and still say, sat the garbage is you know, and he's like Jesus. I thought, this is the ownership mindset. It wasn't working. And that's when I realized that when I create systems for families, I don't just say okay, brother a CFO, sister COO, okay, we're good like let's get moving. What you often have to do is back up and understand that how we communicate about domestic life is going to be the most important communication practice of our lives. And so in my day job, when clients would say to me, well, we don't communicate about the family business. But then I'd go into a meeting and we'd have Dad. Every time his son would speak, he'd walk out of the room. He said, well, I was just going to get you a drink of water. It's like, no, you walk out every single time your first son speaks.

25:11 So this idea that we're already communicating about domestic life. I was obviously by the garbage liner and following set around the kitchen. So understanding that as if I was my own client, I took my own advice. We instituted a communication check in when emotion was low, emotion was low, and cognition was high. And I said to Seth, look, I'm going to explain to you why I think i'm your garbage shadow. I'm your garbage shadow because I really don't think you know this about me. But I did not have a garbage can growing up. I had a garbage bag on this on a knob, the garbage would spill out all over the floor. And every night when my mother did not come home on time because she worked like I would put my disabled brother to bed.

26:02 When he would ask for water, I'd have to go into the kitchen and get out. Sorry, my son is knocking. I'm gonna literally, I'm gonna hold on. Let me just call. I'm just gonna go and say hold on. I think Ben's knocking on my door because he's interrupting the podcast. Okay, can you ask or get Seth to grab him? All right, thank you? Okay, still doing the invisible work, Eve, Just yeah, yeah. Yeah, visible work. That's well. You the average woman had interrupted every three minutes and forty two seconds. We actually got a good chunk of time. Yeah. So what I needed to happen was for Seth to understand that for me, garbage falling out onto the floor was actually bringing me back to a really dark place in my life where I felt abandoned, alone in charge of my brother. And then he was able to say to me, well, I've actually never really thought about garbage. You know, I had a housekeeper growing up, and you know, maybe I actually like garbage. I slept on pizza boxes in my fraternity.

27:02 So how interesting what happens, Cass, Right, Does that mean I just do it again because I care more? No, because then they were back to the starting point where all hundred cards would fall on me. So what happened was Seth said, we need to come up with a standard, and I said, yes, it's called the minimum standard of care in the law or in medicine. Our minimum standard of care became garbage goes out once a day before Seth comes upstairs, and it'll include the diaper pail, and it'll include the small garbages and that's the end of garbage. That was it, Cass. Then it was like a miracle. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was the first time in my life where there was consistent accountability and trust over garbage. And then we grew from there and.

27:50 Then you could let it go. Let it go because you full trust. I never think about garbage ever again. And that has been we're like eight years later. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. You started with a partner who was on board with this, I'll say equality.

28:31 We'll get in a minute to equity. And it occurs to me that there are many women likely listening whose partners are not so on board, right, And I often have conversations with women about this about oftentimes men in these heterosexual relationships are pretty comfortable with the status quo, you know, getting there buy in to a system like this, like for many women, is going to be a huge hurdle. How do we do that? They've got no real reason to want things to change because they've got it pretty good with the way things are. Well, they think they do, possibly, but I would actually say they have things really bad. And that's that's why there's about forty percent of our listeners and our newsletter subscribers are men. Wow, Because what's been interesting hearing from men is that while I think the number one thing in seventeen countries cast that women told me they hated about home life was they can't shut their mind off, the number one thing that men told me though in heterosys gender relationship that they hated about home life was they can't get anything right. I thought it would be nagging right, which is a secondary concern, but it was this more of this idea that I really did try, but it was this false narrative. There's not that much for me to do. My wife breastfeeds, And then I would get so angry and be like, Okay, well, what

30:04 about marriage and romance and middle of the night comfort of the baby and being her partner coach if she wants to do? And what about her in laws? And what about her aging an ailing parent? And what about watching of the baby? And what about good deeds? Do you ever think about what you want to add? What about thank you notes for all the things that the baby got? And I'd go through all of these things. What about spirituality? Are you going to get your child baptized? And just on and on and on. I'd say, well, what about those things that has nothing to do with breastfeeding? And what I realize, instead of getting angry at men understanding the empathy from their perspective that when you don't know your role, that's actually the worst place you can be in an organization. The lack of psychological safety when you don't know where you fit in is highly toxic as well, and it leads people to retreat and ultimately quit. And so in this case, the quitting metaphor would be stopping to help or to say instead, well, I will help you if you just tell me what to do. So we get into these really terrible dynamics, so how do we get out of them? Well, as my mother says, why are you writing to women? Eve, this is a men's problem, I said, I understand, but I do think that the thing I want to say to you is that you cannot change your partner, but you can. We all can recognize we're living in pluted air.

31:25 I have a fair Play Policy institute to work on the pluted air, paid leave, universal childcare. The US is the worst, the worst. So we're breathing pluted air. But that doesn't mean you can suffocate. You have to still breathe. And so the analogy, if you carry it through to the mask, the mask is understanding that it can be a both and you can take agency in your own life. You can be a game changer in your own life. As well as understanding that you're living in a mess up system. And so if women come along this cultural movement with me, what happens is that our self talk has to change because we've been conditioned in a culture in all the sort of these white patriarchal countries, colonists countries, colonial countries that have that women's time is infinite, it's sand, it's not worth anything. Men's time is finite, and so we start to be conditioned to protect it. We know if women enter a male profession, salaries automatically go down.

32:27 So we're hearing that culture message that our time is worthless. We say things in our societies like breastfeeding is free when it's really eighteen hundred hours it's a full time job. But then what happens is that back to our self talk where we can start the change as how we internalize that our time is worthless and the four most popular things that we say to ourselves, which is what you can do today. Remember this took me ten years. So all I'm asking you is to sit in this learning because we're going to come back for episod so too on the benefits of living in a partnership where you believe these things. But if you can sit in the understanding that you deserve a permission to be unavailable from your roles. You are more than your roles as a partner and or a parent, and or a caretaker and or a professional, and by professional I mean anybody who works for pay or works in the home. And if you can retire saying things like I do more unpaid labor because my partner makes more money than me. Oh, yes, my job is more flexible. We have to retire that because time is time. You get twenty four hours in a day, it's not money. We have to stop saying to ourselves in the time it takes me to tell him her, are they what to do? I should do it myself. That's a classic devaluing of your future time.

33:48 We have to stop saying things like I'm a better multitasker, I'm wired differently for care. That is absolutely not true. There is no gender difference in our ability to multitask. Multitasking, in fact, is bad for everybody, and our brains are not conditioned to do that. And finally, another common one is, yeah, we're both colorectal surgeons, but I can find the time whereas my husband's. But you know, better at focusing on one task at a time. So once we realize there's actually no way to find time or not Albert Einstein, we can't mess with a space time continuum. There's only a difference in the expectations over how we use our time, then everything will change. And so when I said to myself, it didn't start with garbage. It started with I'm going to change my life because I'm not staying in a marriage where Seth is the one who has time choice and I don't. I'm not staying in a marriage. And I said this to myself. I said it to him much more gently. But it started with my understanding that he has four hours after our kids go to bed to check the sports sites and to work out and finish a power point deck where I'm doing things in service of our home till my head hits the pillow two hours later after here he goes to bed, And that fundamental unfairness is not something I'm willing to live with anymore, no matter how much I make monetarily, it's not a dynamic that I will live in any longer.

35:07 And that was the self talk cast that's the precursor to fair play. But it's the most triggering work because it's exactly the opposite of how we've been conditioned as women since we were born. It is so true all of those things that you were saying. I was thinking, hmmm, I've either said them to myself or people listening are saying them to their selves. And that is the hard work, isn't it. It is changing those fundamental assumptions, just these ideas that we've all just grown up with and realizing that they're not true. So if you, as you were talking then about the baby and the thank you cards you are holding up Listeners can't see, but you're holding up cards from the fair Play deck. This is genius. Can you tell me?

35:57 Because I think everybody should go out and get themselves as I did say that you also have lucky You can download a PDF version from your website. Tell me about the fair Play cards. Yes they are revolutionary right, well, yes they are because to me, anytime you can gamify difficult conversations, that's what I've been doing again as a decade working with really difficult families. Cards have always been really helpful to me. I'd have these patriarchs casts would say things to me like I don't know why they hired you. I'm not going to die, so I'm like, well, I'm not sure why i'm here either. If I'm here to make your succession plan and you're not going to die, I might as well just leave, right, So it became a lot easier to say, let's play a game. How do you picture your legacy? Is it a bird? Is it this picture of a mountain? Oh, it's a coin. Why tell me about that coin? Well, my first dollar was selling newspapers, and I became obsessed with newspapers, and that's why I bought my first newspaper locally. And you know, you just get these amazing stories out of people when you can gamify things. And so the beauty of the fair Play cards if you realize that you listen to this podcast or have the book to understand, it's not a who does what? If you just say, well, I do them all and you do nothing, not helpful. That becomes just using the cards as a list. But if you understand their power in saying we're going to get buy in for the opposite of assumptions, the end of bias cass is structured decision making. We know that we know that when there was a hospital study where women were dying

37:29 twice as much of blood clots as men, they weren't getting the medicine. There was assumptions that women are more hysterical, they complain of pain too much. When you had a structured decision making questionnaire that had actual questions to ask a patient women stop dying, that's all fair play is. It's a structured decision making tool to say, hey, there's one hundred cards here. I don't think we want a life of overwhelm and boredom and resentment. So why don't we look together to see what we can take off our deck, what we actually care about at this point in our life, what we can let go of. And that exercise is the beginning of how you enter the fair play system by building your deck together. And that's what I was telling you about that storytelling, because when you build your deck together, you start to tell yourself stories and your partner stories that you may never have told them, Like what I had. How important garbage was to me to keep in that deck because of my experience with the cockroaches and water bugs in my childhood apartment.

38:34 So that is the beauty of I'd say anything, any type of tool that can help you have difficult conversations. And I said before that I know that you use the term equity over equality. Can you explain the importance of that distinction. Well, I'd seen some research where I was looking for perceived fairness because I don't actually know what actual fairness means. And in the nineties there was some weird scholarship but called equally shared parenting, which made literally no sense to me as an organizational management specialist. It was this idea, well, cass, if you do garbage today, I have to do it tomorrow. If you make I know, forty thousand dollars this year, I make forty thousand dollars next year. It just I don't know. It sounded my numbing scorekeeping. I wouldn't even know.

39:19 There was these crazy, giant like tallies of how you know if you've done one thing the person does the other thing. It's the opposite of this idea of an ownership mindset, where of course you can redeal. It's not like I'm going to watch my toddlers forever. But when you're redealing, you're redealing with ownership mindset. Not I did it once. You have to do it. It's like, hey, I'm going to do the watching card from two to four today, and then how about you take it from four to six. And that doesn't mean no in secting each other, do the kidney to eat lunch or dinner. We know what timeframe it is. You have the full ownership mindset, that type of way in to you and your partner's life, and it becomes eye opening. It becomes, as we said, opposite of assumptions. Where as my daughter said, reminding me means, you know, assumptions make an ass out of you and me. The opposite of this is this idea of, as we said, the structured decision making lens, in which you can start building a life together that feels incredibly meaningful based on your values.

40:21 Yeah, I mean it sounds like I would love to know how it's changed your life and your family dynamic. It's a great question. I think it's I mean, it's completely changed our lives. And I think Seth still makes more money than me quote unquote right, but we stop looking at value that way. He will argue that my career is more important than his because he understands that we are now looking at value differently. We're looking at value as things that give service back into our community, things that can change people's lives. He understands that cultural change is a lot harder job than his job as an investor. So we have a very different view of value.

41:05 And what that has done is it's allowed set to be so much closer to our children. He is an active partner as opposed to a helper. And a lot of people say, well, how did you get there if they don't know this, if they didn't unpack it like you just beautifully did as an interviewer, And I'd say, well, do you just have to write a book about your partner where you portray them in a terrible light, that's all you have to do. But Seth allowed me to tell our story because even back in twenty sixteen when I started to write this, fair Play had been so meaningful and in our immediate circles and in the people who are beta testing the system. And so Seth said, even though this story is not going to be comfortable for me to hear, I'm going to let you tell it however you need to tell it, and however you need to portray me. Because the late at the end of the tunnel for our family has been so important.

42:04 And for him, it's this understanding that being a parent, being a caretaker, an hour holding his child hand in the pediatrician's office is equally valuable to an hour in the boardroom. And I will tell you one thousand percent he didn't believe that at the beginning of this fair Play journey. Yeah, and I know that for the women in your audience and mine too, like who are so beaten down, overwhelmed, exhausted, you know which they all are. They tell me all the time that they all are, and they cannot see a way out of this. They've lost the sense of themselves.

42:46 They have no space. They feel guilty for taking the tiniest bit of space for themselves because they're so convinced that their whole role is to be in service to the family. And I think this is absolutely potentially life changing. I'm so excited about Thank you. I know that you already have loads of you know, readers and listeners here in Australia, but if they haven't heard of this book, I want them to go out and get a copy and get the deck of cards and truly game changing. Thank you so much, and I am super excited to come back and talk to you about once you've done this, when you've done the fair play work, and once you've freed up that time, and once you've reconnected with your partner in a healthy way, how we can create that space to find that creative self expression, which is also just game changing.

43:41 So thank you so much. I think that's the late at the end of the tunnel. As we said, this is the hard work, and I will say that thank you to your listeners because I just want to keep reminding everyone that this took me ten years to learn. So a lot of this work is highly triggering in a way that I didn't realize when I first wrote the book, because we're at such all of us are different stages, and so start where you are. Yeah, start where you are. Maybe it's just living journal. Go grab a journal, listen to this podcast, follow casts, stay with us on this journey because your time is diamonds and we see you and we see your invisible work. Yeah. Absolutely.

44:27 And just one other point too, especially for the mothers, like just the role modeling that is so important here about how we demonstrate the value of women and women's time and our contribution in the world, because I think too often women who sacrifice themselves, you know, for their children or for their partner, you know, really don't consider what that is demonstrating for, particularly their girl children, but also boy children, and how important it is to balance that out. So if thank you so much for being here, and I cannot wait to talk to you again about unicorns. Thank you really love your work. Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.

45:08 You know. What I really love about this fair play thing is that each person's responsibility for a task runs from conception to execution to completion. No half finished jobs, no clothing that has been wash dried and then left to sit in a pile. Conception, execution, completion. Honestly, it is a game changer. If you would like to apply the Fairplay system in your life or find out more, the Fairplay Book is available at all Good bookstores. The Fairplay Card game is also available to be ordered online or as I said, Eve does have a PDF version that you can download at her website. She's at Evrodski dot com. She's also at Fairplaylife dot com, so check out both of those websites or follow her on social media if you want to keep up with what Eve is doing, and as I said, she will be coming back to talk to us about Unicorn Space. I cannot wait for that conversation. I look forward to catching you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy listener