Hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson talk about meaning in today’s episode. Why does the same situation or item have a different meaning for one person than it does for another? The same apple may be delicious and coveted by one person and viewed as gross and undesirable by another. Jessilyn and Brian explore how we form meanings and how we can change those meanings to reach different understandings of situations.

One of the key examples of something that almost everyone in the world places meaning on is money. Money means many different things to many different people and can cause a lot of conflict in relationships. Jessilyn shares how she came from a poverty mindset growing up, rather than an abundance mindset, because her family did not have money. But even when she and Brian started achieving financial success, she maintained her poverty mindset until she explored where that meaning came from and could learn to change it. Jessilyn and Brian discuss how to discover where our meanings originated, why those meanings get stronger the more we experience a situation, and how a meaning that is held today can be changed tomorrow.

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Transcript 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We help couples create the wealth they desire by sharing our stories and how we broke through the barriers to create our wealth.

Brian Persson: [00:00:20] We are the creators of the Discover Define Design framework, which supports you in resolving conflict and communicating better. More recently, due to high demand, we decided to create the relationships, riches, and real estate segment of our teaching. After all, who does not want to be wealthy, right?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:37] Yeah. So our topic this week is meaning. So what meaning we put on things. For example, why does the same situation have a different meaning for you or for I? I'm going to use a real simple example here, like eating an apple. When you're eating an apple, that is what it is. You're just eating the apple. But someone might say, this apple is delicious. I love apples, crisp and juicy and they make me happy. Then there can be someone on the other side who hates apples, and so they put a meaning onto it that apples are gross, they're disgusting. So it's a different meaning for a different person depending on who it is and what they put on that simple situation of eating an apple.

Brian Persson: [00:01:19] Yeah, the exact same action, two different like feelings and outcomes to that exact same action. Another super important thing that pretty well the whole world puts on a whole lot of meaning on is money. And that happens a lot in relationships. You have two different people inside that relationship, and they have two very different ways of viewing money. Some view it as bad, some view it as good, some view it as they don't understand it, some view it as I got this like, let's go make a bunch of money. And that can cause a lot of conflict in relationships, even though a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. And there's really no difference between the physical form of money.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:06] Right. So meaning kind of comes down to our interpretation or our int