Of all the boneheaded decisions I’ve made in my life, choosing my life partner was NOT one of them. I knocked it out of the park on that one. She has lived through me accidentally punching her in the nose while setting up a camping tent. Me discovering I left my license at home while trying to get through airport security. Me being generally slow on the practical home skills-uptake. (I’m looking at you, crooked laundry shelves!)

Choosing her stands as the best decision I’ve ever made. And I love her most for her – you guessed it – smoking hot MIND.

She’s brilliant. She’s fierce. She’s a communications expert.

Once a friend asked me what it’s like to be married to a communications expert. I replied, you have to have your talking points in order.

Boy did I ever! Because my thoughts – brilliant as I thought they were – were truthfully messy, disorganized, buried under irrelevant associations and movie quotes.

I needed to clean up my thinking. Some of it wasn’t even MY thinking, but the thinking of others I grew up with – family, friends, Texas and church cultures. I had self-defeating stories about myself. I held views on groups of people that just weren’t true. I couldn’t see my own advantages as a man.

She taught me to think better. And you know what happened?

I did the same for her. Me - the historian-pastor, educator-philosopher turned business consultant and strategist - taught my brilliant better half to think again. To think better.

I taught her to see a friend’s bid for connection. I helped her see the spiritual and emotional gifts that came to her through a dark night. I clarified and distilled all the crazy postmodern literary theory she endured as an English major in the 90s.

Here’s what I discovered with her: thinking better happens best with those I love, who trust me and our relationship enough to show me my distortions, my narrow frames of reference, my leaps in logic.

Thinking better happens best with a dose of humility too. Humility predisposes me to listen, to absorb, to experience. It creates space mentally and emotionally, allowing my perception to be focused on, and yet open to, another. In this way, thinking better usually begins with a question: “What am I missing or not getting? Where might I be wrong? And where might my thinking partner have a point?”

If you never ask yourself those questions, I’ve got news for you: you aren’t thinking.

You’re reacting. You’re assuming. You’re lying to yourself or to others. But you aren’t thinking.

Thinking is what happens when we listen – to others, to ourselves, to the world around us. That’s when I helped my wife understand that the painful emptiness she was experiencing - which she wanted to avoid - was actually the clearing out of everything unhelpful, in order to be drawn into something deeper, richer.

It’s what happens when we become aware that not all thoughts are created equal. That’s how my wife helped me understand that the recurring thought inside my head - “I’m not good at that” - was just a thought, a story I told myself about myself. And not even a true one.

So think better. It’s possible with love. It’s possible with humility. We all need to do it better, for the times ahead will demand it of us.