If you think shared values are the key to making a relationship last, think again. Shana James talks with Nick Brancato, author of Prioritize Us: Unlock Lasting Love with One Simple, Proven Test, about why relationships fall apart despite shared values. We discuss the real keys to lasting love and intimacy.
Find out how to have the best love and sex of your life!
Why Shared Values Aren’t Enough for a Lasting Relationship: Show Notes
The wisdom that relationships work best when you “share values” is popular, and to some degree it’s true.
But so many couples, despite shared values, still feel disconnected, frustrated, or misunderstood.
Why?
According to author and coach Nick Brancato, there’s something more important to look at. He calls them your core life priorities.
While values are about what you believe in, priorities are about how you live those beliefs day-to-day. People and priorities change over time. So to keep a relationship alive, you have to create a consistent way to communicate and collaborate that honors each person, and that recognizes the priorities of safety, understanding, and caring for each other.
When partners don’t navigate their struggles with maturity, and when they don’t communicate about tensions and upsets, the bond of a relationship weakens. Nick and I talked about how to keep a relationship not only alive, but make it deeply loving and supportive. We discussed…
- How to identify core life priorities and whether you and your partner are in sync
- Why “shared reality” matters more than “perfect agreement”
- The one question to ask before making any decision together
- Why to stop trying to emotionally match your partner, and what to do instead
- The importance of letting go of regulating your partner’s reality, and starting to regulate your responses!
Nick’s wisdom is deep and his heart is huge! This is an important podcast for anyone who struggles to understand their partner, or who wants to learn to love better, and to feel more loved.
Also, speaking of having more love, I created a new free quiz for those of you who are looking for love, but it’s challenging to find:
Click here to see what’s getting in the way of you finding love
And if you’re in a relationship already, this is the quiz is for you:
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They only take a few minutes and you’ll get personalize results and solutions to have more of the love you want. I want you to have it!
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Bio:
NICK BRANCATO is a seasoned personal development coach and educator with over 25 years of experience helping individuals and couples connect, communicate, and thrive. With a master’s degree in education and a background as a Microsoft systems engineer, Nick blends practical tools with data-driven frameworks to guide clients through life’s challenges, including career shifts, financial pressures, and personal growth. Nick’s holistic process incorporates meditation, guided visualization, and hypnotherapy, emphasizing both emotional insight and actionable steps. By fostering deeper connections and mental clarity, Nick empowers couples to transform tension into trust and misalignment into mutual success, creating lasting, meaningful change in their relationships.
Transcript:
Shana James (00:02.296)
Hello and welcome to this episode of Practicing Love: Have the Best Love and Sex of Your Life After 40. I’m excited to be here today to talk about a different approach to creating connection and intimacy in a relationship. And I’m thrilled to have Nick Brancato here with me. Welcome, Nick.
Nick Brancato (00:25.96)
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Shana James (00:28.558)
Nick is an author, relationship strategist, and personal development coach. His new book, Prioritize Us: Unlocking Lasting Love with One Simple, Proven Test, focuses on how couples can be aligned in their values, mission, and purpose.
I often work on the intimacy side — not just sexual intimacy, but emotional intimacy. I know many amazing coaches who, like you, focus on values and purpose. I think it’s a powerful balance: having both the capacity to communicate and interact in ways that create more connection, trust, and depth.
Nick Brancato (01:14.91)
Absolutely.
Shana James (01:23.118)
Breakdowns often happen when we think we’re having the same conversation, but we’re actually having different ones — or when we’re not aligned in our values and come from different places. That can make it seem like one person is “right” and the other “wrong.” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. To start, what’s your current relationship situation, or anything important from your relationship history you’d like us to know?
Nick Brancato (01:55.934)
Sure. I’m married to my wonderful wife — we’ve been together for over 10 years and married for a few. We have a great relationship and work on it every day. One important thing to know is our biggest challenge: mental health. My wife has schizophrenia.
She’s doing well now — this is a happy story — but for a long time it was very hard. One of the things that led me to write the book was how it gave us a shared point of connection to navigate our biggest challenge together. When one person lives in a nonlinear reality, traditional relationship advice breaks down pretty fast.
Shana James (02:56.429)
Wow.
Nick Brancato (02:58.461)
We weren’t just learning each other’s love languages — we were decoding entire frameworks of perception.
Shana James (03:07.54)
Mind-blowing. I’m in awe, because it’s hard enough when we share the same reality to love and receive love. I have so much respect for you for navigating this, finding your way through, and not only that — coming out the other side with a book and being in service of what makes a relationship last.
Nick Brancato (03:30.526)
Thank you, I really appreciate that. It means a lot. There were seasons where I didn’t know how to support my wife without over-functioning — times when silence meant safety, and other times when what she needed most wasn’t my solutions, but my presence. That was hard, and sometimes it still is.
Shana James (03:33.634)
Yeah.
Nick Brancato (04:00.114)
It’s still a constant practice of reminding myself that —
Shana James (04:06.158)
Exactly — that’s why I called this Practicing Love. We don’t just stumble on a solution and then click, we’ve got it forever. Reality doesn’t work that way.
Nick Brancato (04:09.371)
Yes — it’s a beautiful name, I love it.
Nick Brancato (04:21.639)
For so long, I thought love meant always having the right answer. Now I’m learning — and still learning — that real love isn’t about fixing, but about understanding.
Shana James (04:38.19)
Hmm. Yes, that’s a beautiful way to put it. I imagine not everyone has such an extreme mental health challenge in their relationship, but we all go through life stages, hormone changes, transitions, family members getting sick, and so on. For you listening, this episode on creating relationship compatibility beyond shared values is applicable, whether or not you have a mental health situation this intense.
Nick Brancato (05:21.319)
It’s absolutely applicable. When you find a framework that works in extreme situations, it usually works in everyday situations too. If something’s forged in fire, it’s that much stronger.
Shana James (05:28.194)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Beautiful.
Shana James (05:38.476)
Because you’ve faced the ultimate challenge—continuing to keep your heart open, love, and stay connected with someone whose needs and reality are so different from your own.
Nick Brancato (06:04.721)
Yes. It’s always challenging, but rewarding to find solutions that keep us connected.
Shana James (06:14.518)
Wow. My grandmother was schizophrenic. I remember it was challenging—by the time I was a teenager she was older and declining, and it was terrifying. But I’ve thought about it since: I have a spiritual nature and can go into states that the rest of my family might think are “crazy,” but to me they’re real and beautiful. I’ve wondered how much overlap there might have been between her state and mine. Back then, treatments like electroshock were common—thankfully, that’s changed.
Nick Brancato (07:11.549)
Thank you for sharing about your grandmother. What you touched on is so important: what you perceive that others might not is part of your reality. Everything is a continuum. Everyone’s mental health exists at different points on a spectrum—whether that’s attention, perception, or sensory processing. You may be able to relate to your grandmother more than others in your family. What you now have frameworks to understand through spirituality and education might not have been available to her, so she was likely labeled quickly.
Shana James (07:13.142)
Yeah.
Nick Brancato (07:40.534)
…and maybe misunderstood.
Shana James (08:09.122)
Yes, I think so. It makes me think about mature love—the kind many listeners strive for. In immature love, if a partner stops meeting our needs or things get hard, we might walk away. But in mature love, we face challenges together.
Nick Brancato (08:56.285)
What you said about immature love is important. Many people think choosing a life partner is a one-time decision—that the person will stay the same forever. But the real decision is to partner with someone for the long term: to adjust, adapt, grow together, and weather life’s storms as a unit. Values may remain the same, but priorities change. Knowing the difference matters—core values are the pillars, but priorities answer “what’s important now?”
Shana James (10:16.972)
Yep. I love that. And we can get more into the values before we do that. I’m curious, because this framework that you created in your book came from some of these struggles. Can you say a little bit more about what the struggle was like? You know, again, for those listening who don’t have a partner with a bigger mental health challenge, it may feel a little bit extreme, but I think we can learn from your experience — and then we’ll get into how you’re practicing with that.
Nick Brancato (10:51.805)
Thank you, I’ll be happy to share. So my book Prioritize Us was sort of born from the most turbulent, challenging time of my life, when my now wife was experiencing all these crazy, serious mental health issues. And for a very long time — years, in fact — we just didn’t know what was going on because she was experiencing paranoia.
Extreme paranoia, so much to the point where she would rarely eat food because she thought it would be tainted. So if anyone but her prepared it — even delivery, even food out — she lost like a third of her body weight. It was really terrifying, and it was all just unclear. She was having hallucinations too, but we didn’t know that for a long time, and she was hearing voices. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
Shana James (11:32.994)
My gosh. Yeah.
Nick Brancato (11:49.341)
Throughout all this turmoil, our relationship actually improved during the crisis.
Shana James (11:55.902)
Wow. Okay. That is almost unheard of. Yeah, tell us.
Nick Brancato (11:59.046)
Right. And the reason was because we had a lot of miscommunications in the beginning of our relationship, because we speak different languages — sort of come at things from opposite angles, even if we agree. So we had natural miscommunications, but all our small arguments and communication struggles — not all of them, but many — sort of fell to the wayside very rapidly.
Shana James (12:26.296)
Wow. Yeah.
Nick Brancato (12:27.697)
When we realized that health and safety were both of our top priorities. Before that, career was really important. I was extremely career-focused, growth-focused. Relationships sort of took a back seat. Once I valued health and safety as the most critical piece of our life together — because I was so concerned, because it was so critical, and literally her life was at stake — everything else just became secondary.
Shana James (12:32.375)
Amazing.
Nick Brancato (12:57.019)
We had an aha moment where we realized that if having the same priorities makes everything easier and makes communication simpler — because you’re not focused on the small details, you’re focused on the big picture — then what if we apply this idea to the rest of our relationship?
So I began identifying and ranking sort of 10 core life priorities that subsume most of the things of day-to-day life. I realized that couples often argue about surface-level things. The real conflict — right?
Shana James (13:36.586)
Yeah, totally. In my book, I have a section where it’s like, it’s not about — I can’t remember exactly — it was not about the laundry, or the dishes, or even the finances, right? It’s just so much deeper than that.
Nick Brancato (13:51.836)
Yes, it’s so much deeper. You have to zoom out to get some perspective. The real conflict so often comes from unspoken or misaligned priorities. I identified these 10 core life priorities and ranked them one through 10 — 10 being most important, 1 being least important.
Shana James (14:14.902)
And you identified these in general for humans, or between the two of you?
Nick Brancato (14:21.607)
Great question. So in general for humans focused on a relationship. They can be changed — the list can be changed. You can make your own 10. But it’s a great starting point, and you could substitute one priority for another if it’s more applicable. For example, sex is a priority in a relationship. If you wanted to use this with your kids, you might make play a priority, or school, or something like that.
Shana James (14:46.446)
Yep, got it.
Nick Brancato (14:50.065)
What we do is rank them one through 10 separately, then compare the lists. That’s important — you want to do it as an individual, not be swayed by what your partner puts. You compare results and your goal is not to have the same priorities, but to identify where they’re similar and where the differences are. So if I rank something as number two and you rank it as number five, the difference is three. That’s a minor difference. The difference could be as high as nine, or zero if the priorities are the same. You add all the differences together to get a total difference score — zero through 50. Zero means perfect alignment, which almost never happens. And 50 means exact opposite alignment, which could happen but is rare.
Shana James (15:44.312)
Yeah, we were really far apart.
Nick Brancato (15:49.022)
I tested this method in my coaching practice with as many couples as I could find. We discovered hidden misalignments everywhere in priorities. Couples who had been together for years often didn’t talk much about certain priorities they ranked highly — like spirituality or sex. Sometimes they talk about it in the beginning, but not deeply or ongoing.
Shana James (16:17.25)
Yeah, it’s amazing how many people come to me, and when there are different priorities or needs, and I ask what conversations have you had about this, especially about your sex life, sometimes the answer is, “We haven’t.” Ten years, twenty years — it’s mind blowing and so sad to me because then —
Nick Brancato (16:18.447)
On an ongoing basis.
Shana James (16:43.448)
People are living in silos with the person in their home who’s supposed to be the closest person to them — and that is so lonely.
Nick Brancato (16:52.061)
It’s lonely, it’s sad, and it’s avoidable. That’s the thing. It’s actually low hanging fruit for relationship improvement because sometimes it just takes one or two or three conversations where you shed light on an area that was dark or gray before — just bringing it out.
Shana James (17:15.234)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Brancato (17:20.541)
When you compare your priorities, you don’t want to have the same ones necessarily. You want to adopt a learning stance. Get curious and ask why. Why is this your top priority? Why is this in your top three?
Shana James (17:26.156)
Hmm. Yes. Yeah. I love that. I love that. That’s so aligned with my work too because sometimes one person has a desire or need, and the other person’s like, “That’s not me. I don’t do that,” and starts to list reasons why it’s not okay. Which comes from fear, from wounding, from all these things — but the curiosity gets lost. The why — why do you want this? What is your motivation? Let me get curious with you. The fear can take over and shut all that down, and then we don’t get to know each other.
Nick Brancato (18:13.233)
Yes. I love what you said because sex is a form of communication as well — and a very underrated, underrepresented one. When people think about communication, they mostly think about words, emails, texts, but not about physical communication, behavioral communication, or intimate communication.
Shana James (18:37.546)
I like that one too — behavioral communication. Kind of like actions speak louder than words — our behaviors are actually speaking for us.
Nick Brancato (18:47.171)
Exactly. You could say something, but if your face reads different, everything is off. It’s incongruent, and your message isn’t received as you intend.
Shana James (18:58.86)
Yes. Yes. Powerful. That’s even a different piece than values or priorities. That’s the piece I work with a lot — maybe you do too — about how we communicate. Sometimes I think about conversations as content and connection. The content is the informational exchange, and connection is based in some of those invisible pieces, which are incredibly important.
Nick Brancato (19:27.397)
I love that. That’s great. I’m going to add that to my framework. I think of it as content and context, but it’s also connection.
Shana James (19:33.422)
Yeah. That’s beautiful. I love the context too. It’s so important. If we’re not in the same context, we’re having a very different conversation, or it’s not based in “Here’s how I love you.” It can be heard as “Here’s what I think is wrong with you,” if the context isn’t set up.
Nick Brancato (19:56.862)
So true. Context also has to do with having a shared reality. Something I practice all the time is creating shared context regardless of what’s being perceived. Certain things are just human — like drinking something, like consuming a beverage. Regardless of the reality you’re in, a hot beverage is still soothing. It still takes five or ten minutes to drink.
Shana James (20:01.24)
Yes. I love it.
Nick Brancato (20:24.473)
So my wife and I have a hot beverage ritual every morning and it just takes five or ten minutes. Our rule is no devices and no talking about other people. So we talk about ourselves, each other, and any challenges we’re having, of course. No matter what’s going on in our realities, this is grounding for us because it’s something human and shared. We get this connection point every day — just a small touchpoint. And it makes…
Shana James (20:34.68)
Beautiful.
Nick Brancato (20:54.469)
…a massive difference because it compounds over time. It’s a habit that creates an upward spiral for us.
Shana James (21:00.706)
Yeah, I love it. We have so much of this shared language of shared reality. I think that’s one of my favorite framings, right? Because we don’t have to necessarily agree on something, but if we don’t understand how the other person is holding it, then there’s no coming together.
Nick Brancato (21:21.051)
Yes. One way I think is great to vet a relationship — or a potential long-term relationship — is: how much of reality do you want to share with your partner? Are you all in? Do you want to have an integrated life, a true shared reality as much as possible? Or are you trying to have separate worlds — where we share this reality together when we’re home, but have a different reality at work, and never mix the two? That might…
Shana James (21:37.014)
Mm. Yeah.
Nick Brancato (21:49.682)
That sort of compartmentalization might work for some people, but in my experience, in the long run, when you’re not integrated in other ways — or at least to some extent share reality — conflict will occur because you lose context. When you have shared reality, you’re sharing context and connection.
Shana James (21:54.05)
Right.
Shana James (22:13.986)
Yes, that’s so beautiful. I can see some people have the context that “we’re gonna interact this way and only about these parts,” and if that works for people, okay. But I think you and I both lean toward: the more we know each other, the more curious we are about each other, the more we actually share — we can build trust and the foundation that someone has my back and I’m loved, and all of those things.
Nick Brancato (22:44.317)
Exactly. Couldn’t be more on the same page.
Shana James (22:45.196)
Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about a way of practicing? Like, say to people: we have this discrepancy, a gap in our values. What’s the practice? What do you do there?
Nick Brancato (23:11.261)
Terrific question. So when there’s a gap, what we practice is: I don’t try to regulate my wife’s reality. I try to regulate my response.
Shana James (23:24.132)
Ooh, okay. Say that again.
Nick Brancato (23:27.643)
I don’t regulate my wife’s reality. I regulate my response.
Shana James (23:29.908)
Yep. Brilliant. Yep. Either way, any gender, right? That’s just a brilliant statement.
Nick Brancato (23:33.617)
Thank you. Yes, any gender. I don’t regulate my partner’s reality. I regulate my response. So what we’re practicing now is mutual coherence — not emotional matching, but emotional harmonizing.
Shana James (23:52.366)
Okay. Did you say emotional coherence? No, what was it? Mutual coherence? Okay. And emotional harmonizing?
Nick Brancato (23:54.375)
Yes. Mutual coherence. Emotional harmonizing rather than emotional matching, which is what humans tend to do by default. They mirror and try to get their emotions in sync. They think it might be empathy or sympathy — sometimes it’s both, sometimes neither. What we’ve learned to do is design rituals around safety, not performance.
Because performance varies day to day and season to season. And the reason it varies so much is because everyone has mental health challenges. And everybody—did we cut off?
Shana James (24:51.97)
I think it froze for a couple seconds. Maybe we could just go back to after you said mutual coherence, emotional harmonizing — maybe go back to that part?
Nick Brancato (24:56.507)
I can rewind, yeah. Okay.
Nick Brancato (25:05.693)
Sure. So we practice mutual coherence, not emotional matching, but emotional harmonizing. So many people by default mirror another’s behavior. They think it’s sympathizing or empathizing, sometimes both, often neither — they’re just matching emotions. A lot of times when you do that —
Nick Brancato (25:33.298)
— you bring up personal things, emotions triggered from your past, which takes you out of the moment and understanding what’s going on for your partner. But when you emotionally harmonize, that often means being in a different emotional state than your partner. So when she’s having a hard time, it’s better if I’m not. When I’m having a hard time, it’s better if she’s not. So rather than both having a hard time about —
Shana James (25:56.182)
Yes.
Nick Brancato (26:03.431)
— different problems, or even the same problem at the same time, we regulate our responses as best we can. And we’ve learned to design rituals around safety, not performance.
Shana James (26:19.96)
Beautiful. Can we go back to regulating your response? Can you give an example? I want to make this concrete because I love this.
Nick Brancato (26:25.212)
Yes. Sure.
Nick Brancato (26:32.519)
Sure. Rather than regulate my wife’s reality, I regulate my response. So if my wife does something I’m uncomfortable with or find surprising — or something I had an expectation about — it could be something simple, like leaving food out and not putting it in the fridge or dishwasher. Someone might get upset about this — food spoiling, messiness, why didn’t you do the dishes, why didn’t you put it away, we’re wasting food. Any of these narratives might come up.
Rather than jumping to those things, I try to regulate my response. I have to say, we might not even be in the same reality right now. She might not be doing the same things for the same reasons. Maybe the food needed to cool to her, or maybe…
Shana James (27:20.152)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Brancato (27:28.667)
She was distracted by something much more important to her mental health or life or career.
Shana James (27:32.75)
You’re getting curious, like: what motivations could she have had that aren’t the judgments I’m making?
Nick Brancato (27:42.214)
Right. And if she was distracted by something with her mental health, don’t I want her to focus on that instead of this little problem? If she was focused on her career, don’t I want her to prioritize that over this problem? Can’t I deal with this later? I’m doing nothing anyway, just thinking about it. Obviously, I could have dealt with it. I’m not saying you should always clean up after each other, just get curious and don’t assume you know someone else’s motives because —
Shana James (27:47.854)
That’s so loving.
Nick Brancato (28:11.513)
Often you don’t even know your own motives. If you don’t know what you’d do in that situation, it’s hard to know what someone else would do.
Shana James (28:18.446)
Beautiful. I often use a principle that some people question, but it works for me: assume the best, then get curious, versus assuming the worst. I can see it doesn’t fit if you’re not already in a relationship with someone where there’s trust and safety built, right? Then maybe I can’t assume the best about someone else. But with your partner or child or close person, I think we can assume: this person isn’t doing this to get back at me. I think this person has some internal intention or motivation that’s good. Can I get curious? Like, you came home late — instead of assuming you’re doing this to get back at me, it’s more like, “Hey, I noticed when you show up for me and our family, you’re usually on time. Can you help me understand what happened here?” That curiosity versus blame or attack or dysregulation.
Nick Brancato (29:29.201)
Yes. And that’s very interesting what you said about believing the best in the person. What if you tweak it slightly and say: I’m going to believe in the baseline of the person. So when you love someone, that baseline is at a high place — you believe they’re well-intentioned, acting with shared regard for you.
Shana James (29:43.47)
Mmm. Okay.
Nick Brancato (29:58.576)
Each of you, with a shared vision for your future together. Maybe the behavior doesn’t make sense to you in the moment, but give them credit for that baseline — and that baseline is high because of everything they’ve done in the past for us. For other people, the baseline might be different, so maybe it’s dangerous to give too much credit, even if you’re curious. Like in the workplace, that could be…
Shana James (30:23.97):
Right.
Nick Brancato (30:28.623):
A dangerous thing, but in a personal relationship, I think it’s wonderful because—
Shana James (30:31.982):
Totally, yeah, I agree. It could be dangerous, but even within my own mind, it can be helpful to search for, okay, if they weren’t out to get me, or if they weren’t trying to, you know, I don’t know, do something negative to me, right? Like, what else could their motivations be? What else could be going on? Right.
Nick Brancato (30:51.685):
Yes, do they have to have ulterior motives? What are three reasons that work for me or for us or for them that aren’t to my detriment that could be the reasons?
Shana James (31:02.242):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sometimes think about this one. I’m actually going through and repairing an experience I had with someone where we were on very different pages. And so we’re getting together and talking about it. And it’s fascinating to me because a lot of people think, write people off and say, forget it. But I’m like, how are we going to actually heal this world if we can’t even have conversations with people who are similar to us, right? Then you take the wide gaps that many people are experiencing these days and how do we bridge those and heal those, right? I think we have to be able to get curious.
Nick Brancato (31:46.322):
Yes, get curious, be willing to be uncomfortable and have different difficult conversations. Being willing to lean into the discomfort because that’s where so much of the growth takes place. Getting curious is, I think, one of the best traits that someone can have because it leads to growth, it leads to personal development in all kinds of ways, and it leads to tremendously increased communication.
Shana James (31:49.421):
Mm-hmm.
Shana James (32:12.654):
Yeah, and I’m not trying to say that anybody should go have a conversation where they don’t feel safe or they don’t, right? We’ve got to check in with our own body and our own nervous system and see what we can handle and when we can handle it. But right, when we’re in these loving relationships with our partners, we can choose more loving responses versus these dysregulated reactions.
Nick Brancato (32:38.237):
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I practice with my wife is sort of how to pause the world when her nervous system asks for a different tempo.
Shana James (32:49.198):
Beautiful. Can you say more?
Nick Brancato (32:52.175):
And so we’re practicing grace as a rhythm rather than grace as a reward.
Shana James (32:55.15):
Grace as a rhythm. I like that. Right, it’s not like you’re giving someone grace after the fact. It sounds like you’re giving them grace in the midst.
Nick Brancato (33:09.243):
Right, in the midst or regularly, regardless of circumstance, giving someone grace so that you’re not always holding to some high expectation that no one can meet.
Shana James (33:13.133):
Mm-hmm.
Nick Brancato (33:23.421):
Because no one can be 100% at anything.
Shana James (33:25.706):
No, no, for sure. And I love that. There’s so much kindness and so much acceptance and love and appreciation and like all the good stuff I’m hearing.
Nick Brancato (33:38.461):
Aw, thank you, I appreciate that, means a lot.
Shana James (33:40.526):
Yeah, beautiful. Is there anything else that feels important to you that you want to communicate about your process or your practices?
Nick Brancato (33:54.696):
I would say the last thing that I would encourage people to practice in their relationships that my wife and I practice is something we call the “move us” test. And this is what we filter. We run everything through this. So does this move bring us closer together or further apart?
Shana James (34:07.244):
The “move us” test.
Nick Brancato (34:19.047):
So does this decision, does this choice, does this behavior bring us closer together or further apart? How does it move us? So it’s the move us test. And that question alone has saved us more times than I can count, especially in situations of extreme turmoil, because it can be easy to default to act in a self-interested way, potentially. And that never happens when you say, does this move us closer together or further apart?
Shana James (34:28.482):
Beautiful.
Shana James (34:47.704):
Well, right, inherent in there is the us — the we, right? It’s like, it can’t move us closer if it’s only good for one of us. There has to be a shared sense of the relationship or the between us.
Nick Brancato (35:05.041):
Yes, I like to say we want our relationship to be mutually beneficial and long-term sustainable. That’s the key.
Shana James (35:11.086):
Mm, I like that. Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you. This has been delightful and so powerful. And there’s a way that I feel the lightness of your heart and the depth of your wisdom at the same time. It’s not coming through this like holier-than-thou or this is how we have to do it. I feel so much humility as you’re bringing such wisdom about shared values and priorities and the keys to a lasting relationship.
Nick Brancato (35:39.437):
Aw, thank you so much. That means a lot to me.
Shana James (35:41.706):
Yeah, thank you. Where can people find your book and more of you?
Nick Brancato (35:48.029):
So people can find my book Prioritize Us on Amazon. You can get it in paperback or hardcover. It’s also available as an ebook. If you go to nickbrancato.com — B-R-A-N-C-A-T-O, nickbrancato.com — you can actually get the ebook absolutely free. You can just download it on my website. I just want to help as many people as possible.
So if you’re interested in taking the test or learning more, grab the ebook.
This conversation resonated with you and you want to get deeper support applying any of these principles. I have a couple of spots open for coaching where I work with couples or individuals on their core priorities and confronting misalignment and building stronger relationships.
So if that sounds like something that would benefit you, feel free to DM me on Instagram at personaldevcoach — and I’d be happy to answer any questions or I’d love to hear from you. I’m very passionate about this subject, so I’m happy to talk about it.
Shana James (36:52.27):
I feel your passion. Thank you so much and thank you for being here to talk about what makes a relationship last and relationship compatibility beyond shared values.
Nick Brancato (36:57.277):
Thank you for having me.
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