Your giving has three numbers, and most couples have only ever said the first one out loud. Until all three have been named, you are not making a giving decision. You are repeating a habit and calling it a decision.
Your giving has three numbers, and most couples have only ever said the first one out loud. Until all three have been named, you are not making a giving decision. You are repeating a habit and calling it a decision.
The frame comes from Ron Blue in Generous Living, and he states it in six words: "Should give, could give, would give." The should number is your baseline, the obligation you already accept, for many families the tithe. The could number is what becomes possible if you plan deliberately, trim something, redirect something. The would number is the one almost nobody says aloud: what you would give if fear left the room, if you fully trusted that the family would still be safe.
Why does naming the three numbers work? Because the gap between them is a map of what is actually holding you. If should and could sit far apart, your problem is planning, and planning is fixable with a budget session. If could and would sit far apart, your problem is fear, and fear responds to a different treatment: naming it, testing it against your real balance sheet, and moving toward the would number in steps small enough to survive. Blue spent years cataloguing the blockers that keep families from generosity, and his consistent finding was that the blockers lose most of their power once they are spoken. A number that stays in your head negotiates with you privately and always wins. A number said to your spouse across the table becomes something two people can walk toward together. The couple that names all three numbers has turned a vague ache about generosity into an ordinary plan with a direction.
Here is the habit, on a yearly cadence, built for two:
LegacyPot hosts this in the council module as a couples exercise, with each partner entering numbers privately before the reveal. The prompt that opens the session is the one that matters: you know what you should give. Tonight, ask what you could give, and what you would give if fear left the room. The app keeps each year's three numbers, so over a decade you can watch the gap between could and would narrow, which is what growth in generosity actually looks like on paper.
This week, put one evening on the calendar with your spouse and bring three blank lines each: should, could, would.