Straight from the Source's Mouth: Frank Talk about Sex and Dating
Are you perpetually single? Do you want longer-lasting relationships? Tired of the miscommunication and misunderstandings? Wish you were better in bed? Advice from experts as well as real talk from real people so that you can see you are not alone in your thoughts and experiences. I talk about sex in my stand-up comedy and people often tell me that I say what they are thinking but are too afraid to say or admit it to their partners; too taboo they think. We'll talk about books we've read on dating, relationships and sex so that you can gain knowledge without having to read all the books yourself. I'll interview people on both sides of an issue: people who are great at dating and unsuccessful at dating...learn from the person who's great and also learn what not to do! We'll do the same with sex and relationships so that you can learn what works so you don't need to repeat others' past mistakes. I'll interview sex coaches and love coaches. We intend this to be a how-to guide. Hit subscribe and join us!
Straight from the Source's Mouth: Frank Talk about Sex and Dating
#88 Love Beyond Conflict: Understanding Priority Misalignment
Relationship conflicts often seem to revolve around surface-level issues—unwashed dishes, someone coming home late, or disagreements about money. But what if these everyday arguments are actually symptoms of something deeper? Nick Brancato, personal development coach and author of "Prioritize Us," joins Tamara to reveal how most relationship tension stems from misaligned priorities that remain invisible until deliberately examined.
Nick's journey to relationship coaching took a fascinating path through careers as a Microsoft systems engineer, high school teacher, and professional poker player. While coaching high-stakes poker players, he discovered that relationship troubles significantly impacted their decision-making abilities during tournaments. This insight, coupled with his own experience navigating his wife's schizophrenia diagnosis, led to a breakthrough realization: when priorities align, relationships thrive even through extreme challenges.
The conversation delves into Nick's innovative system that identifies ten core life priorities and measures alignment between partners. He explains the crucial difference between values (long-term beliefs) and priorities (what matters now), offering practical examples of how couples can bridge their differences. Through compelling case studies, Nick demonstrates how simple rituals around shared priorities—like morning meditation or nightly device-free check-ins—create anchors that help navigate misalignments in other areas.
Most powerfully, Nick reveals how his Total Difference Score (TDS) serves as a "relationship credit score" that objectively quantifies alignment. He emphasizes that successful relationships don't require identical priorities—in fact, moderate differences allow partners to complement each other—but they do require understanding, intentional conversations, and meaningful adjustments.
Ready to transform your relationship? Download Nick's free ebook at nickbrancato.com or follow him on Instagram @personaldevcoach to learn how making the invisible visible can prevent unnecessary conflict and deepen your connection.
Thanks for listening!
Check out this site for everthing to know about women's pleasure including video tutorials and great suggestions for bedroom time!!
https://for-goodness-sake-omgyes.sjv.io/c/5059274/1463336/17315
Take the happiness quiz from Oprah and Arthur Brooks here: https://arthurbrooks.com/build
NEW: Subscribe monthly: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1805181/support
Email questions/comments/feeback to tamara@straightfromthesourcesmouth.co
Website: https://straightfromthesourcesmouthpod.net/
Instagram: @fromthesourcesmouth_franktalk
Twitter: @tamarapodcast
YouTube and IG: Tamara_Schoon_comic
Welcome to the Straight from the Source's Mouth.
Speaker 2:Podcast Frank talk about sex and dating. Hello everyone, Tamara here, Welcome to the show. Today's guest is Nick Brancato, a personal development coach and educator, and we'll be talking about his book Prioritize Us. Thanks for joining me, Nick.
Speaker 1:Hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2:Yes, me as well, and the book is like great timing and I thought it was really cool, so we can jump right in. What had you start with this book, or what brought you to this line of work, I guess?
Speaker 1:Well, I came to this line of work through an education background and a computer background. I was a Microsoft systems engineer and a high school teacher and adult school teacher. I have a master's degree in education and I taught for a while. I was a tenured teacher, and then I started playing poker and actually became a professional poker player and began teaching for the World Poker Tour and traveled all around the country doing seminars and teaching people like high stakes decision making under pressure and mindset management, and through that process, a big part of what I uncovered when coaching poker players was that the mental side of the game was as important, if not more important, than the strategic side of the game. And so poker really is life, and when you're playing at the table, you're playing for 10, 12, 14 hour days, multiple days in a row, and so anything that's going on inside your mind is going to impact your decision-making at the table. If you're distracted, you're not going to play well, and so what I found was that I was doing a lot of relationship coaching as well, because people were distracted by their relationships, both their romantic relationships and their other kinds of relationships. Sometimes they were distracted because they were single, and I did some date coaching, dating coaching, and sometimes they were distracted because there was turmoil in their relationship, and so I began doing more and more coaching that way, and then what happened is my now wife began having some serious mental health issues. So it was a really hard time in my life and we didn't know what was happening. She was having hallucinations and she was having extreme paranoia. She lost a lot of weight because she thought her food was tainted and things like that. So it was just an awful period, and so we took a break to allow ourselves some time to figure out what was going on with her health. It's a happy ending. She's okay now and she's thriving. She's on the right medication, but what we found out was that she had paranoid schizophrenia, and so, despite the severity of the situation, our relationship actually improved during the turmoil, and the reason was because all of our previous miscommunications and surface level issues fell to the wayside because we had the same priorities. All of a sudden, health and safety became our top priorities, and so, for the first time, we were perfectly aligned.
Speaker 1:Instead of me being focused on my career or her being focused elsewhere, we were focused in the same areas, and so that was like an aha moment, and what it realized was that, if having your priorities aligned makes everything easier, what other priorities are there in life that we can look at and more deliberately address?
Speaker 1:So I began identifying 10 core life priorities and those are in the book Things like career communication, entertainment, health, safety, and what I found was that people are arguing over surface level issues so much of the time when the real conflict comes from misaligned priorities. So I identified these 10 core life priorities that cover most aspects of life, and then you rank them one through 10 and you compare them to each other and what you get is a total different score. It's a system I created and it's a data-driven tool that measures priority alignment and misalignment between partners, and so I tested this method in my coaching practice and with everyone I could find, and what I found was that couples were always uncovering misalignments, and just by uncovering these misalignments, they were communicating better, because they were making the invisible visible, just by simply understanding their priorities. And so I saw how effective the system was and I decided to try to help as many couples as I could, and so Prioritize Us was born to help people navigate misalignment and prevent unnecessary conflict.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, when I read through because you gave me a copy, Thank you and when I was reading through it, yeah, it made complete sense because I've done that. I've always said that having shared core values is like the thing that ties you, but those are like the major issues. Those are like the major issues and, like I mentioned earlier, I'm in a now live-in situation when I was previously long distance and some of the misalignment is coming to like becoming more known. So, yeah, definitely, this is like perfect timing and I was going to ask one thing about my situation.
Speaker 2:One of our issues is I am very much like efficiency driven, like I want to do everything smarter and like you know, just right away and he's more laid back and there's no rush, and I don't know what that falls under, but if you can speak to that at all, that's great.
Speaker 1:That's actually a lot like me and my wife. I'm very systems oriented and efficiency driven and she's the opposite in so many ways, and so that can fall under a few different areas. That can fall under growth personal growth, Because how you're spending your time, if it's personal development related, it can fall under communication. If you communicate in a more systematized, methodical way than he might be used to. It can also fall under relationships.
Speaker 1:How do you prioritize your time? What does quality time look like to both of you and how much of it fits in with the other priorities in your life at this moment? And I think it's important to differentiate between something that you said. You mentioned values, and that's so important having aligned values, but the difference between values and priorities is that priorities ask the question what's important to me now? So priorities change much more frequently than your values. Values are more like core beliefs. They change gradually over time unless something really significant happens. So they're more with you for most of your adult life and your priorities are constantly changing, so you need to check in on them much more frequently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can definitely see that and after having said that, I think quality time is our thing. Like we have differing opinions of we both value quality time and prioritize it, but I think we just do it differently and we do communicate about it, but anyway, how do you do it differently?
Speaker 2:I guess his idea of quality time is relaxing and chilling and you know, going with the flow, and I just want to be together and I'm naturally just more efficient and quick and you know rushing basically. So he just wants to like his idea of relaxing with quality time is slow and mine is like just getting stuff down or whatever it is. It's just I'm always fast, right and there's, and he always says that we're not in a rush, and that's in 90 of the time we're not in a rush, and that's in 90% of the time we're really not in a rush. So it's more my issue to to slow down. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are you when you're when you're fast? Is it because you're in the in the future a little bit, or is it because you're in the present and just things are speedy?
Speaker 2:I'd say it's more in the past, because my dad was so impatient growing up, that my sister and I like learned and needed to be efficient, like otherwise we'd get in trouble, or like he'd get impatient with us.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's more like a passing, at least that's self-diagnosed.
Speaker 2:but yeah, no, it's so interesting. Yeah, that's where we say it's from. But yeah, but back to your book. I mean, I think these are like really amazing things for everyone to get and it would make life so much easier if they understood this. So do you have examples? I know in the book you mentioned a few examples of people. Do you want to start there? Sure absolutely.
Speaker 1:I have a few examples that we can talk about for sure. One couple that I've been working with recently that comes to mind. They've been together for about 10 years and one of them works full time and one of them stays at home and homeschools their two children that are around five and seven. This is an interesting dynamic because it's a non-traditional setup where she's working and he's at home, and so they have that going on, and when they take the test, what they discover is that they're misaligned in certain areas but they're aligned in other areas. So they're misaligned in career and they're misaligned in sex, but they're aligned in spirituality. That's number one for both of them.
Speaker 1:So instead of looking at where they were first most different, I started with their strengths. So when there's a big gap in some area, like when the gap is more than, say, five between a priority, so you're ranking things one through 10, and then you're taking the difference between two priorities. So if you rank career number one and I rank it number five, the difference between the two is four, and so that's an average size difference. If it's five or more, then I would think that that's a pretty large difference. It could be as high as nine, and so when there's significant differences in a relationship, I encourage couples to start with their strengths. So where are you aligned? What's the same? So in a relationship, I encourage couples to start with their strengths. So where are you aligned? What's the same? So, in this case, a pillar was spirituality for them. So I ask once people rank their priorities, I ask them to do a time assessment and take a look at how much time they spend on a weekly basis on each priority. So if career is number one, how many hours a week are you spending on it? 40, like a traditional work week. Is it 60, 80, 20? Okay, and then how much time do you spend on things like entertainment? So what you often find is that people rank entertainment low as a priority, but they spend a lot of time on it and they don't have to do that self check-in. So one of the great things about the book is that it helps you rank your own priorities and figure out what's important to you and check in with yourself so you can see if you're in alignment with where you want to be at. So once you compare that with your partners, what I discovered was that they had very little time allocated to spirituality, even though it was number one for both of them.
Speaker 1:So what we did is we we created a few rituals for them to ground them in the relationship so that these differences that they were suffering from around career and sex uh uh become less prevalent in a day-to-day basis. They're more focused on their strengths at first. So in the morning they just do a five-minute ritual where they either meditate or pray together or just sit in silence with no devices and just spend quality time together in that way, and then they have another ritual before bed where they have a nightcap together with no devices. It's like 10 to 15 minutes and they check in with each other around that, and that's where they do their check-ins for the day. What they check in on is they ask each other what are three big decisions that you made today or that you have to make tomorrow? Decisions that you made today or that you have to make tomorrow, depending on what day it is, and so what that allows is for them to be more on the same page and have a shared context for what's going on with each other.
Speaker 1:So, even though one of them is very focused on career right now because they might get a promotion. So they're more focused on that. What they're more focused on, that, what they're able to do, is he's able to know that she's focused on her career because of the decisions that she has to make from the day, and he's able to contribute or at least understand what's going on and why, and help in the decision-making process. So, even though he's not directly involved in her career anymore, it's a shared journey. They have a shared vision for it and now they're more on the same page because of these check-ins and they're grounded because of their rituals around spirituality, when they weren't spending any time on it at all. Now they also have a weekly check-in where they spend an hour, which is so much more than nothing, doing the same thing that they do with a five-minute ritual in the morning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially, like you said, if they say it's number one and they're not doing anything. And I was going to say earlier too, it's harder to understand what you think your priorities are versus what you actually do. So I like that you have the time where you actually consider or really know what your priorities are. From seeing how much time you spend on them, I could see where people think they're one thing and do another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my goal when I'm working on things for myself or with my relationship with my wife, or when I'm doing any kind of coaching, is for tell people's actions be in alignment with their intentions. So this is especially true when I was coaching for poker. Like the, you want to execute the plan that you had ahead of time in real time, under pressure, when the decisions come up. So how you spend your time is a great way to check in with yourself to see if your actions are in alignment with your intentions, because your intentions are how you rank your priorities. That's how you mean to be allocating your resources not just time, but also money, relationships, all the things at your disposal that are tools you can use to improve a priority and move things forward more efficiently. All those resources should be allocated to your biggest priorities and you should make sure that you're not using a lot of time or money on things that are low priorities. And you should make sure that you're not using a lot of time or money on things that are low priorities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes complete sense. And earlier, when you're talking about that example of him understanding like she was really gunning for a promotion in that timeframe so he could take it less personally if she had less available time. For him and I know that's something that I always need to is like the more information I have, more clarification I have, the more I can cope with.
Speaker 1:Yes, with change. Right, Because having that shared context is so important? Because, instead of always wondering why the person is doing what they're doing, you now have an understanding of what their actions make sense to you, instead of you dealing with this unknown range where you just your mind makes up narratives that are often about you, often negative, you know and instead of filling in those gaps with your imagination, you're filling them in with the shared context. So one of the things I'd encourage anyone to do in a relationship like right now or soon is to just jot down your top three priorities to you. What are they right now? Ask your partner to do the same separately and then just compare and what you're going to find is there might be some overlap, but there's going to be a lot of differences and it's going to spark these interesting conversations immediately. Where you can.
Speaker 1:Just I encourage you to adopt a learning stance. Be curious about this. It's not about having the same priorities. It's not like oh look, we both have the same top three. That's not the goal.
Speaker 1:The goal is to build communication and understanding by asking why? Why is this your top priority? Why is this in your top three? Why is it so important to you right now. Are you surprised by mine? Here's why mine are important at the moment. Here's how it might change once I get the promotion. Here's how it might change if I don't get the promotion, and we could talk about things and develop like a shared vision together for what our future looks like. That's one of the things that I'd encourage you to do now that you're moved in with your partner is to take uh, take some time and ask each other what a day-to-day shared vision looks like Like. What does it look like separately? What does it look like to you? What does it look like? And then compare and see where the overlap is like. Oh, wow, we would both love doing this every day. Oh, that's quality time. Or we'd both need our space for this little interval here, so that we can miss each other and then rejoin and connect in that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we've definitely talked about those kinds of things, but we could do more, for sure. Yeah and I like what you said about you know people who tend to overthink. This will be very helpful to take the guesswork out and the imagination, like you said.
Speaker 1:Right and it takes out the emotion. So it's an objective data-driven system where your priorities are your own. Once you list them, they don't need to be the same as your partner's and you don't need to want your partner to have the same. Differences are actually good because you can fill in each other's gaps. You don't want to be so different so that so that you are constantly in conflict. But if you're so the same, then you actually have blind spots in your relationship sometimes. Because you're so aligned, you can take a lot of things for granted and be on autopilot. Tds scores are total, different scores. They can be between 0 and 50. And often somewhere in the middle is where couples kind of are in power mode Because they complement each other, kind of are in power mode because they complement each other. And if they're checking in and doing a priority alignment, then a check-in like this, then they're able to see where their gaps are and address those with communication before conflicts occur.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see where that's very helpful. Do you want to talk more about the book or how they can reach you, or how they can get the book first and then go in some more maybe?
Speaker 1:Sure. So actually anybody who's interested in the book Prioritize Us can get it on Amazon right now, and if you go to nickbrancatocom, you can actually get the ebook absolutely free for a limited time. And so go to nickbrancatocom, grab the ebook and start working on your priorities right away. If you're interested in what we're talking about and you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram at personal dev coach, like personal development coach, personal dev coach on Instagram, and feel free to DM me with any questions that you have. I have a few spots available for coaching. If anybody's interested, they can contact me at nickbrancatocom or DM me on Instagram at personal dev coach. I'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 2:All right, awesome Cover the main things of the book, unless there's something we're missing.
Speaker 1:So one thing I would want anyone to take away from reading Prioritize Us is that most people don't know how to measure the strength of their relationship beyond vague emotions, and so the Prioritize Us test and the TDS it's like a relationship credit score. It tells you how aligned you are, what's working, what needs improvement, and the lower the score, the better. Your long-term outlook, the less conflicted likely is to be. And it's like would you make a major financial decision without knowing your credit score? Probably not. The more data that you have, the easier it is, and don't let a high total difference score upset you. It's not a death sentence for the relationship. It just means that there's lower hanging fruit for improvement because you can communicate about these larger differences sooner than later, before conflict occurs, and it will also help petty conflicts from occurring because you'll be focusing on things at a different level. You'll be focusing on deeper issues that are around priorities rather than surface level conflicts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can you say more about that? Just to give an example of what people typically fight about and what they're really fighting about.
Speaker 1:Oh sure. So a lot of people fight about things like the dishes or like someone coming home late, or tasks. People fight a lot around tasks or tasks. People fight a lot around tasks. And what's actually going on is that there's a differing priority. Their actions are in alignment with their priorities and so once you look at priorities and you see, okay, you're late because your priority is career right now. So now it makes sense that you were spending extra time at the office. It wasn't because you don't want to have dinner with me.
Speaker 1:When it's something like the finance is something people argue over money all the time. But they often argue over petty things like oh, that Uber was too expensive, or how could you buy the more expensive steak, or I don't know silly things, and the finances is often all wrapped up in safety for people. So if you're not feeling safe because you don't have a financial situation that you're comfortable with, then even petty things will bother you. When it's really about the larger financial picture, you don't particularly care about $10 here or there. Necessarily, that's usually rare. It's more that I don't feel safe because our finances aren't in order in whatever way. Let's address that and then these other conflicts will sort of disappear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's really clear, thank you. Are there any other closing comments? The last thing.
Speaker 1:I'd like people to know is that relationships don't need to be identical to work, but they do require understanding, intentional conversations and small but meaningful adjustments, and my journey with my wife and going through such turmoil really taught me that when your priorities are clear, relationships thrive even under the most difficult circumstances.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that makes great sense, all right. Well, thank you so much for being on. I think this information is going to help a lot of people and I hope you go out and get his free ebook so you have access to all this information. And thank you again for being on. Thank you so much for having me. I love talking with you, yep, and if you love this episode, be sure to tell your friends about it and rate it as well. All right, thanks everyone. Bye. Frank Talk. Frank Talk Sex and Dating Educates.
