> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What Is It Like to Live With You? - URL: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/podcast/what-is-it-like-to-live-with-you-mike-baker/ - Published: 2026-07-24T09:38:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T09:54:40.000Z - Description: Good intentions matter, but the people closest to us experience our follow-through, attention, tone, and the work we leave behind. In this episode of Still Here, Still Trying, Mike begins with a very 2026 attempt to connect Google, Apple, Outlook, and an AI assistant named Mira to finally solve the - Author: Mike Baker - Tags: Podcast, #Import 2026-08-01 07:39 Season 2 · Episode 13 · July 24, 2026 · 24 min [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2%5FehMCcGlg) [Listen on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1iE5t5Nrbs0MyLORJpfiYu) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-it-like-to-live-with-you-marriage-follow/id1826938874?i=1000787952222&uo=4) Just an Ordinary Tuesday New episodes and essays land in my Tuesday letter, along with the Resource Library. Free, and leaving is easy. Email address Send me the next one You’re in. Check your inbox to confirm. ## Show notes Good intentions matter, but the people closest to us experience our follow-through, attention, tone, and the work we leave behind. In this episode of Still Here, Still Trying, Mike begins with a very 2026 attempt to connect Google, Apple, Outlook, and an AI assistant named Mira to finally solve the family calendar. Somewhere between the daily brief and the birthday reminders, the technology led him to a harder question: What is it like to share a life with me? Mike talks honestly about ADHD, responsibility, and the danger of using an explanation as a permanent excuse. He shares the moment he realized Kellie was competing with his phone for his attention, what playing beer-league goalie taught him about owning the result after the puck is already in the net, and what he saw while watching Kellie with all three of their kids together on the Oregon Coast. This conversation is for men who care deeply and still create extra weight for the people they love. It offers a practical way to hear difficult feedback without turning it into a trial about your character. Growth begins when you stay present long enough to understand what happened and let changed behavior provide the evidence. The one action from this episode is simple: Ask someone close to you, “What is one ordinary thing I do that makes life heavier for you?” Then listen without preparing your explanation. Mike draws from The Better Man Field Guide: A Practical Guide for Men Who Mean Well and Still Screw Things Up. Find Mike’s books: Learn more about Mike’s work: [https://mikebakerhq.com](https://mikebakerhq.com/) Thanks for listening to Still Here, Still Trying. If this episode gave you something to think about, please like, follow, subscribe, and share it with three people who could use it in their lives. You can find more of my work — music, writing, art, and reflections — at: 🌐 [mikebakerhq.com](http://mikebakerhq.com/) Grab a copy of my book, The Optimist’s Way: 📚 https://a.co/d/4RqPS6g Thanks for being here. Still here. Still trying. Support the Podcast Here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2516381/support ## Transcript Read the full transcript Auto-generated from the audio, lightly corrected. It may contain errors. Welcome to Still Here. Still Trying. I’m Mira. Today Mike is asking a question that sounds simple until you imagine someone close to you answering it honestly. What is it like to live with you? Mike recently tried to solve his family calendar with Google, Apple, Outlook, and AI assistant and what I assume was a small amount of chaos. The technology was impressive. The number of calendars was concerning. Underneath all of it was an older question about who remembers the details, who carries the follow-through, and whether good intentions make daily life any lighter. This episode is for people who care deeply and still leave work for somebody else. Mike is gonna stay inside that question with you. Here’s Mike. Hello everyone, welcome back to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m your host, Mike Baker. Hey, earlier this week, I spent an embarrassing amount of time just trying to make my calendars talk to each other. I had my personal Google Calendar and then the Baker family calendar and Apple. I was working on an Outlook feed from work and the Mike Baker HQ calendar, and then I just decided that Mira should give me a daily brief, full birthday reminders into it, and send Kellie a weekly summary on Sunday morning. I was building a fairly sophisticated system around a problem that people have been having for a very long time. And at some point I realized that the entire project was organized around eight words that have gotten a lot of decent men in trouble. And those words are just tell me where I need to be, right? I have said versions of that sentence for years. When I say it, I hear cooperation, right? I hear I’m willing to go, put me where the family needs me. The person beside me, Kellie, receives an additional job. She has to know the schedule, protect the conflicts, remember the birthday, notice the travel time, and then hand me the finished plan at exactly the moment that I need it. That realization bothered me because I do not think of myself as a man who expects somebody else to run his life. I am a CEO. I have spent most of my adult life building systems, making decisions, and keeping complicated work moving. I am also a husband with ADHD who has said with complete sincerity that I have had four calendars and still missed shit. Both of those things belong in the same honest picture. My brain does not place information into a calm little row and wait for me to retrieve it. That would be so cool. But a date arrives while I’m thinking about a meeting, a song, probably a healthcare problem, or maybe a book, and whether I remember to order something for the house. I build systems because I care. I also have a history of building systems that require me to remember the system, which is a design flaw that I continue to rediscover. ADHD explains why this takes more effort for me, and that explanation matters because shame does not make anyone more organized. The explanation does not turn Kellie into my permanent calendar department, although she does an amazing job at it, and I am so grateful for her. But if my brain needs more support, my responsibility is to build more support around it. The person that I love should not become the unpaid workaround. And that is where this episode began for me. I was trying to connect software, and the work led me to a much more personal question. I know what I mean. I know how hard I work. I know that I love my family. What is it like to share a life with me? Most of us answer questions about our character from inside our own heads. We use our motives as evidence. We remember the things that we wanted to do, the patience that we meant to have, and the message we started writing before another tab opened. We count the love we feel, including the parts that never made it into behavior. The people living with us work from a very different set of facts. They live with our timing and tone. They notice whether we look up from the phone, whether we follow through without another reminder, and what happens in the room when we feel criticized. They know whether an ordinary request stays ordinary or becomes a long conversation about why we should not be blamed. That gap between the person that I believe I am and the person somebody experiences doesn’t automatically make me a dishonest person. It just makes me human. It also gives me work to do, which is always so much fun. I have blind spots because I’m standing inside my own life. And Kellie, she sees things from a very different place. And it’s a place that I will never occupy. My kids have their own experience of me. The people that I lead know what my leadership feels like when I’m under pressure. And their experience matters even when it doesn’t match the speech that I would give about my values, right? Men often get nervous here because we think the conversation is heading toward a verdict about whether we are good. And I understand that reaction. The title of The Better Man Field Guide is aimed directly at men who mean well and still screw things up. And I am included in that group. I did not write the book from a clean room after mastering marriage and adulthood, right? I didn’t have a trophy here saying I’ve mastered this. I wrote it because meaning well has been part of my story, and so has the damage created when my behavior has failed to catch up. A good guy identity feels safe, right? If I am a good husband, a good dad, or a caring leader, then criticism sounds like an attempt to take that identity away. I start explaining before the other person has finished, right? I point to the full calendar, the pressure I was under, or the five other things that I handled that day. And some of that context is true. It still takes the conversation away from what the other person was trying to tell me. The book uses a shopping cart because the picture is so ordinary. But if I roll a cart onto somebody’s ankle in the grocery store, the first job is to move the damn cart. The other person does not need a presentation about the crowded aisle while the wheel is still sitting on their foot. I’m able to explain the serial display later, but first I need to notice where the weight landed. Relationship conversations go sideways when we reverse that order. Somebody says that hurt, and we hear you are a terrible person. Now the original hurt has to wait while the person who named it reassures us about our character. And I have done so many versions of that. I have made the explanation so large that the other person ended up caring for my feelings while theirs waited. And that’s just not fair. A better response begins much smaller. It’s actually really easy. You just have to say three words. I hear you. I understand why that landed badly. Give me a minute to take that in, right? Those words do not require me to agree with every interpretation or erase my own experience. But they keep the original issue in the room long enough for me to understand it. This is difficult for men who learned that being wrong makes us weak. We turn ordinary feedback into a threat and then use strength to avoid the one thing that would help. Real strength shows up when we are able to stay present after the flattering version of ourselves gets challenged. I have played enough beer league goalie to know what it feels like when a puck gets past you and you are convinced that there should be an asterisk on the scoreboard. Maybe there was a screen, the puck changed direction, a defenseman missed an assignment. My hip moved like a part that was no longer under warranty. And there is usually context, right? Well, guess what? The red light still comes on. And a goalie who spends the next five minutes arguing with the last goal gives up another one. And you have like you have to look at what happened and you have to learn what you were able to learn and then just get set for the next shot. The reset does not mean that the goal defines you, although it feels that way oftentimes, but denying the goal will not help the team, right? That’s just not how it works. And I wish I had brought that discipline home earlier in life. In a relationship, I have sometimes treated context as an appeal. I meant well, I was overwhelmed, work was brutal, my brain dropped the task. Every statement might be accurate, but none of them removes the consequence that landed on somebody else. And there’s an important difference between responsibility and self-hatred. Responsibility says, that was mine, I need to address it. Self-hatred says, this proves I ruin everything, right? All dramatic, like, and then collapses in a way that asks everybody nearby to carry that to. Look, I have no interest in shaming men into growth. Shame makes us hide, defend, and promise more than we are ready to sustain. It just doesn’t work. But guess what? Ownership is steadier. I missed the thing. My tone changed the room. I left somebody else to remember what I agreed to carry. I need a different system or I need to make a different choice. The sentence ends with something that I will do instead of another explanation of who I am, and that makes such a huge difference. This is where public competence gets uncomfortable. At work, I would never tell a room full of people that my commitment to patient care should excuse a broken process. Caring about patients matters. A process still needs to work. If the same failure keeps happening, we change the workflow, assign responsibility, and look at the result. Home deserves that same level of respect. The people closest to us should not receive the latest accountable version of us because they already know that we love them, right? Love should make their experience more important to us. Familiarity often tempts us to relax the habits that make love easier to live with. The test is ordinary. Do I put the event in the shared calendar when I learn about it? Not all the time. I get in trouble for that. Do I answer the question that I was asked? If I say I will handle something, does the other person get to stop thinking about it? When I am wrong? How long does it take before the conversation becomes about my intention? And none of those questions belong on a motivational poster, right? They belong on a Tuesday night when everybody is tired. That is where the people that we love experience us most often. I saw a smaller version of this at home during the work around one of my art shows. I was answering messages about the gallery and letting other people’s opinions pull me back into my phone. Kellie was telling me something important and I was in the room, but I was not giving her my attention, right? She knew, and people usually know when we are half present before we are willing to admit it. We make the right listening noises and we keep our eyes close enough to their face that we feel as if we should receive partial credit. The other person, although, experiences the phone in our hand and the delay before we respond. I put the phone down and I listened, and the moment changed because my attention changed. I did not solve a major marriage problem. I just stopped asking Kellie to compete with the screen for just a few minutes. And that scene stays with me because I care about presence. I talk about in leadership, in healthcare, and human-first work. I believe people deserve to feel seen. And then life hands me a very ordinary test of whether the person I love feels seen while I am sitting beside her. My creative life makes this more complicated. An idea arrives and gets loud. A song begins forming late at night. A piece of art turns into a project, and the project starts creating messages, decisions, and another reason to check the phone. And I love that part of my brain. Kellie has lived with the part that does not always know how to come back into the room. And I’m so grateful for her for that. But this is one of the harder truths in this episode. Some of the qualities people admire in us create a cost at home when we leave them unmanaged. Drive is valuable, but work is able to take every inch of attention we give it. Creativity brings life into our home, and it also needs boundaries. Leadership helps communities while placing demands on the people who share a life with the leader. And the answer is not to shrink the part of me that creates or cares about the work. I want to become more responsible for the transition back. If I need ten minutes to finish a thought, I should just say that plainly and then return when I said I would. If Kellie is speaking to me, the phone belongs somewhere that does not ask her to compete with it. I also have to notice what happens when she tells me I was absent. My first reaction might be, I was listening. A more honest response is I heard some of the words, but I was distracted. And I also have the excuse that I can’t hear very well. So that makes it even harder. But that is the kind of distinction that shows how a person experiences you. It replaces an argument about whether I technically listened with attention to whether she felt heard. And I think that’s really important. And this is where the title question becomes useful again. What is it like to live with me when I am excited about something? What is it like when work is heavy? What happens when my phone has my attention and the person beside me asks for some of it back? The answer will reveal more about my presence than my stated values will. And it’s just really interesting to think about it that way. A few weeks ago, Kellie and I had all three kids together on the Oregon Coast. And we talked about this a couple times, but Cameron was home from New from New Zealand, and Sammy had recently graduated, Jacob was there as the big brother he’s become. And for a little while, the noise of everybody’s separate life just gathered back into one place. And I watched Kellie in the middle of it, and she just gets happy in a deep way when all of the kids are together. And I looked at her watching them, and I just felt proud of the life that we had built. We have been married for a very long time. We were young when we started, and neither of us had any of any idea what the years would ask from us. And that pride is honest. But there’s another truth that sits beside it. Kellie has carried our family with love in ways other people never cease. She has held details together when I was leading a health center, chasing an idea, making music late at night, or trying to remember which one of my four calendars contained the information that I needed. And I don’t say that in to turn her into a saint, which she is, or to turn myself into a problem that she survived. That would just that wouldn’t be fair to either of us. We built this life together, and I have shown up in meaningful ways, and there are places where she had to compensate for me. I’m but sure marriage has enough room to tell the whole truth. Standing near the ocean watching the kids laugh together, I was able to see the outcome of years of ordinary work. There were school schedules, health scares, hard conversations, bills, meals, moves, and all the pieces that just never show up in the family photograph. There were also missed cues, moments when I disappeared into my my work or my own head, and times when a strong intention left Kellie with the follow-through. So the question, what is it like to live with me, does not erase the good life that we built. It helps me honor it. And I want Kellie to experience the man that I keep saying that I want to be. That is different when this person is living with fear or threats or intimidation or violence or coercive control or stalking or even sexual coercion. Those things, if you’re living with that, those things require safety and qualified support. A better conversation does not fix abuse, okay? For the rest of us, the question is useful because the problems are often less dramatic and more repetitive. One person carries the calendar, somebody else agrees to plans without checking it. One person knows that the medication needs to be refilled, the dog needs an appointment, or the family birthday is coming. The other person is helpful when they are assigned and then wonders why their help never seems to count as fully shared responsibility. Being helpful is good, but shared ownership goes further. When I own something, Kellie should not have to keep a small piece of it active in her mind in case I forget. If she still has to track me, remind me, and check the result, I accepted a task without taking the weight. And that is part of what I was trying to solve with Mira and the calendar setup. I do want technology to help. I want a daily brief because external structure helps my ADHD brain. And I want birthday reminders because people matter to me. And caring does not guarantee that the date will appear in my head at the right time. The system becomes useful when it helps me carry my part. It fails when it gives Kellie a more efficient way to manage me, right? So the question in the title of this episode is large. What is it like to live with me? And it might be too large for a first conversation, but it invites an entire relationship review when what most of us need is just one honest place to begin. So here’s one action from this episode. Ask someone close to you what is one ordinary thing that I do that makes your life heavier. Ask it when you have enough time to hear the answer. Do not ask it during an argument or five minutes before leaving the house. Choose someone that you have a safe relationship with and make the question small enough that they do not have to evaluate your entire character. And then listen without preparing your explanation. If the answer is the calendar, the phone, your tone, or the way that every request needs a reminder, just stay with that one thing. Repeat back what you heard in your own words, and then thank them for telling you. And then give yourself enough time before adding context, right? You do not need to promise a transformed life by tomorrow morning. Choose a behavior that leaves evidence, though. Put the event into the calendar yourself. Place the phone out of reach during the conversation. Handle the task through completion. And when you feel the explanation rising, take a deep breath and ask one more question. The people around you will feel the change before they trust the announcement, and that is fair. Trust does not owe us instant credit because we had an insight during a podcast, but let the new pattern become visible. I wrote the Better Man Field Guide for men who care, try, and still create consequences that they did not intend. The book is practical because I need practical. Love gets practical or it stays incomplete. And that line is not a judgment against the love that we feel. It is an invitation to let the people closest to us live inside that love too. I am working on this. I am still connecting calendars. I’m trying to build systems that my brain will use and learning where Kellie has carried more than I noticed. And I am so grateful that growth does not require me to hate the man that I have been. It asks me to tell the truth about who I am and choose what I’m going to do next. Okay, well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Just remember, good intentions matter because they tell us where the heart was trying to go. The people we love live with what happened after that. So becoming a better man becomes caring about both and then giving our attention to the part that we are able to change. This week, ask one person the smaller question. What is one ordinary thing that I do that makes life heavier for you? And then listen long enough to learn something. And then let one change behavior answer for you. Thank you for spending this time with me. I’m Mike Baker, and this is still here, still trying. I’ll see you next week.