The Secret to Shawn Johnson East and Andrew East’s Marriage Isn’t What You’d Expect
Jane LaCroix
There’s something kind of refreshing about listening to a couple who have already lived through several completely different chapters together. That’s Shawn Johnson East and her husband Andrew East. They’ve walked away from careers that defined them before they turned 30, then had to build entirely new identities without the structure or scoreboard they’d spent years chasing as professional athletes.
On The Bossticks, the duo speaks honestly about the way they approach their marriage, work, and raising their kids today. They’re two people who have learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually deserves their energy.
Below are the highlights from the conversation, adapted from the episode.
Shawn Johnson East on Life After the Olympics
You’ve both had successful careers in sports, business, and now media. How do you know which opportunities are worth pursuing?
Shawn: “You have to filter everything for what actually matters to you. I feel like the world tries to tell us what’s important, and it’s really noisy and the world’s pretty convincing. But you have to take a step back and say like, what actually matters to us? And if you can keep that filter on, it makes it a lot easier to say yes and no to things and stick with things longer.”
You’ve admitted you’ve already made mistakes as parents. What did you learn from pushing one of your kids too hard?
Andrew: “It’s like, I want my kid to find a passion, and I want to provide opportunities for him. I want them to get involved…We try to introduce our kids to a lot of different things. It’s a fine line between introducing and forcing, and then it gets confusing sometimes; it’s also super exciting to watch your kid be good at something. So you’re like, ‘Oh dude, game on. Let’s go.’”
Shawn: “We have already learned firsthand, and we’ve done it wrong already…I burnt one of our children from like a passion that they had because I ‘drank the Kool-Aid’ and…I had a coach kind of scout a kid of ours, say we need to fast-track them, we need to do this, they need to be in a different class…And as a parent…I’ve seen this in coaching…It’s all kind of BS. And I remember I bought into it and I put this kid, one of our kids, you know, in the fast track, and within a month, they were like, ‘I’m done’… It just took it from being fun and from being a passion to being serious, and no kid needs to do something serious yet.”
How do you encourage your kids without putting pressure on them?
Shawn: “We’re seeing it with our kids already in different sports and different activities like these burning passions that each kid has and very different things. And so we’ve just found that our job now is to say, ‘I’m so excited for you. How can I help you?’”
With so many businesses and projects, how do you protect family time?
Shawn: “We have really clear boundaries of like when work starts and when it’s over and when we’re home as parents, but when we’re home as CEOs. We really try to make it so that our priority on our schedule shows that we prioritize our family and our kids over everything else.”
What do those boundaries actually look like day to day?
Shawn: “Like school hours. Summer just started, so we’re in la la land right now, but like we would start, we would drop our kids off at school. And then my work schedule would be 9 to 3. So by the time my kids get home, I’m full mom. I’m no longer working. And then Andrew will work until 5, so our kids know that when Daddy’s in the office at home, you can’t go in there. Like he’s working. Like if I even walk into the office, I’m no longer husband and wife, but we’re business partners, so we have those boundaries. And then boundaries as far as what we post and how we post; we also don’t work on the weekends with our kids.”
Andrew: “Sundays are, we call them the day of delight. We do pasta night Saturday night, burger night Friday, but like, we’re pretty regimented with our weekly and daily schedules. It’s been good.”
Shawn: “Sundays, is this, like, day of delight. We don’t do phones on the weekend or on Sundays. We don’t really have rules around our phones, but I will say we’re very blessed. Our kids go to a school where they are so forward-thinking about technology and how it affects children that my daughter will even come home and be like, ‘Mommy, I have learned about the iPhone, and I’ve learned that it can distract you and I learned it can take too much attention. And it can hurt your brain.’ And she’ll be the first one to call me out and be like, ‘I think you’re on it right now too much.’”
Shawn, what was it really like competing at the Olympics when you were only 16?
Shawn: “I mean, to give context, I was 16, so developmentally, there’s not a way for me to even be—I was not mature enough to be able to digest the magnitude of it, which I think was also a blessing. I think 50 percent of me at the Olympics was still just a kid. And I was literally playing and doing an after-school activity. I had that joy. I had that innocence. I had that ability to—my coach protected that for me, and so did my parents.
I remember part of my heart and soul and performance was just a kid playing. I loved it. I think the other 50 percent was kind of torn between the pressures of the job that I was given from the United States and from the USA team and the sponsors and the agents and like the pressure behind Bob Costas, you know, announcing on TV that I should win and like all these things. So I kind of had that, that thing that I had to juggle. But I think because I was so young, I was so naive to so much. I got to learn a lot.”
Do you think if you did it now, older, the pressure would be too much?
Shawn: “I think it’s one of the reasons why I retired. I tried to go for a second Olympics in 2012 and ended up retiring, and I honestly believe it’s because of my more mature mind. I could calculate risks so much better, and I understood the ‘what ifs’ of if things went wrong more than I did at 16. At 16, kind of like our kids, even now, I was just fearless, and I didn’t understand risk, and I didn’t understand consequences. At 19 and 24, years later, I had already kind of been in the business world for four years. I understood the magnitude of ‘What if it doesn’t go well,’ and that crippled me.”
Why was retiring from elite sports harder than people realize?
Shawn: “Transitioning out of professional athletics is really, really hard…You take someone who’s so obsessive and has an ability to obsess in probably an unhealthy way over one thing, and trying to transition into like civilian life or normal life is very difficult. I didn’t know where to put that obsession. And so I had to unlearn how to be a perfectionist, and I had to learn how to just be OK with like average, and that was really challenging.”
How has hosting a podcast together changed your marriage?
Shawn: “It’s rewarding. It’s a challenge.”
Andrew: “I don’t know what y’all’s date nights look like, ours are always kind of like conversation-based over dinner, and for us, the podcast has been so great because we get to be learning from these experts or from these couples like you, live together and so then it’s like it has enhanced so many aspects of our life because we’re like getting introduced to these concepts or these techniques or whatever and you’re like, ‘Oh sweet, what do you think about that?’ And so it’s kind of like been a continued conversation for seven years.”
After everything you’ve been through together, what makes a relationship last?
Shawn: “Two people willing to work. I think if you have two people willing to put in the work every day, it works.”
Andrew: “We had a couple share a technique or just a saying that they remind each other of anytime they’re in an argument…They always remind each other that we know how this ends, and that’s with us still married. And I think if you have that willpower or that commitment to say, ‘Hey, no matter what happens, no matter what high we’re riding or low we’re riding…We know how this ends. It’s with us still married,’ and it’s like there’s something really calming about that.”
What have you guys carried through from athletics into your business careers?
Shawn: “Celebration of failure because we learned from it. And then just a persistence to keep going. Even when it gets discouraging…You have to fall flat on your face a million times before you ever succeed.”
What are your morning routines like?
Andrew: “Our 4-year-old wakes me up at 5:30…He’s like, ‘Dad, you ready to work out?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna say no to you.’ I’m not gonna like be a pansy and not work out with you. So when we wake up, he and I have a little snack. I’ll do a workout for about 45 minutes or an hour. He’ll do pull-ups, and we’ll kind of just watch—he loves watching motocross…And then we have about an hour and a half together as a family…We’ll start work around like 9.”
When you see something from your past, like a football or gymnastics mat, how does that make you feel?
Andrew: “I’ve been through phases; I think right after my football career ended, not necessarily by choice, there were a couple of years where I was just kind of done, but now I’m having more fun playing football than ever.”
Shawn: “Same thing. I went through phases where I had no interest in going into a gym now. Our kids enjoy going to the gym. They’re slowly understanding that I did gymnastics and he did football, so it’s something they’re curious about.”
To hear the full conversation, listen to The Bossticks wherever you get your podcasts.
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