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 Welcome back to another episode of The Road to Life podcast with Meredith and Craig. We're on episode 1 0 3, the countdown's on to episode 1 0 4. Yeah, I can't wait for that one. I'm excited. Let's go. But this week we've got an exciting episode. What are we talking about, McKay? We are talking about entrepreneurship and marriage and how they kind of go together like.

PB and J peanut butter. No. PB and j baby. No. Peanut butter and cheeseburgers. What? They go together like peanut butter and cheeseburgers? No. Yes. What? 'cause you don't think, at first glance that peanut butter and cheeseburgers go together, but they go together. If you have not tried it. I want no comments until you go try peanut butter on your cheeseburger.

It's a thing. Peanut butter and cheeseburgers. Go try it. Marriage and entrepreneurship like peanut butter and cheeseburgers. Sounds like she's gonna stand by that. Oh yeah. What's a hill she's gonna die on? It came up recently, we were on a call with a lady who is an entrepreneur and is married and they work in two separate businesses, but are thinking about joining forces for some things.

Anyways, she asked us what are your three tips, three best tips for. Someone who is an entrepreneur and also married to their business partner, and we thought about that and we said, you know, this is gonna make a good episode, but instead of three, because we like to overdeliver, we're gonna give five.

So , five tips for married entrepreneurs to navigate . The trickiness of being married and also spending an exorbitant amount of time in a business that's also in a very stressful situation like entrepreneurship's. Not for the faint of heart as it is if you're just doing it, you know, kind of doing your thing.

Throw marriage on top of that. It's hard. It's a peanut butter cheeseburger. Anyway, so number one, what's the first tip? The first tip is being. Aware of what hat you're wearing when , because when you work in a business together and when you're married. You wear a lot of hats, like you're at least two best friends, business partners, married, couple, sometimes mom and dad, some like daughter, sister.

Like we wear a lot of hats in the run of a day, and especially when you're running a business together, it's important to know what hat you're wearing when, 'cause that changes the tone of the conversation you're having. Think about like this. If you go to your spouse. During the day, and you're asking them from the perspective of like, you're a wife, going to a husband asking them a question, and you go as a wife, expecting your husband to answer you, but he answers you as the CEO or the CFO of the business, and he gives you an answer that you're not really looking for or a tone the situation isn't aligned with what your expectation was.

There's going to be misalignment. There's going to be. Friction there. Yes. So we wanna make sure that we are very clear when we start a conversation that I need my business partner, I need my husband. Not the other role. Yes. Just to be very clear and to align expectations. Going into any conversation, expectations are so important.

So when you have those expectations clear upfront, it eliminates a lot of miscommunication, maybe some hurt feelings. , It definitely reduces conflict. So just being clear and expectations upfront. And like a one BI would say to this one is being super clear on your roles within the business. It took us a little while.

Yeah. There's, to figure this out. Yeah. There's definitely some trial and error if you're just getting into business together because sometimes you don't really know what your roles are gonna, , line out to be and, you don't know what you like and dislike yet because if it's a new business, so there is a little bit of trial and error what you're good at, but it is going to be, at some point, something that you're gonna want to get clear on is like, who owns this role, whose role takes care of this. Yeah. And that'll help with, overlap and friction of, you know, geez, why are we both spending time doing the same thing? Mm-hmm. Like, I was over here doing it. You're over here doing it. We've wasted so much time when one of us could have been doing something else.

And so it just, that friction reduces when we can get clear on who's, doing what. What are we good at and what do we enjoy doing? Yeah, I think that brings a lot of clarity to the situation and the more clarity you have, the less miscommunication and conflict you have. So that's the first one, knowing which hat you're wearing, being clear on that and being clear on your roles and responsibilities inside the business.

Number two. Prioritize us time. Entrepreneurship can be all encompassing. It can be chaos. It can take over your life if you allow it to at the expense of other things in your life, like your relationship.

And so it's really important that you focus and have dedicated scheduled time. That's just for the relationship. That doesn't involve emails, business phones, all of the things to do with. Entrepreneurship focus on just building the relationship. Mm-hmm. And even if you love your business and even if it like brings a smile to your face every time you bring it up, it is still important to maintain your relationship outside of the business.

So carving out that time is critical. I would also add A two B. My two B bullet point to this one is I like having a good differentiation of work time versus not work time. Like 'cause especially if you're an entrepreneur who works from home, it can all bleed over and you may have some dedicated time set aside on Wednesday night for your date night to go do your thing without work and be completely insulated from that.

But it also is helpful to have a little bit of a boundary between work time and home time, whatever that looks like for you, whatever that boundary looks like for you. For us, it often, not every single day, but a lot of days looks like going for a walk, like, oh, right. We're done here now, like we're gonna close the laptops.

Let's go for a walk, get any last things out that we need to discuss and plan and get creative around. And then by the time we get back from our walk, we are in home time. And I think that really works well for us. Not necessarily gonna work well for everybody, but having some level of boundary between work time and home time at the end of your day is, helpful.

Number three.

Let them in. We see this a lot with entrepreneurs. See entrepreneurs are problem solvers. We create businesses to solve problems that we've encountered in the world. We do not like to be problem creators, so when something's not going well, we don't often like to bring the problem . Home. We try to solve it.

We just try to deal with it in our own way and protect the other person from having to go through the same mental torture that we're going through. And it's got the best of intentions. It's protecting it's love. It's, I just wanna help you not have to go through what I'm going through dealing with this problem.

Yeah. Trying to keep the stress away from you. The thing is, is we're all meaning making machines as human beings. And so when you know your spouse. Senses that you're off, something's going on with you, and you are not letting them in and telling them what it exactly is. Then the story start. She starts, or he starts, or they start telling themselves stories about what the actual problem is, and most of the time, the story that they're telling themselves is actually worse than the truth.

If we had just let them in, they'd be like, oh, that's way, way less than I thought. What the problem was, it's not nearly as bad as what I had made up in my hand. Nowhere near as bad as I thought. But anyway, the thing is, like letting them in, it really does allow them to then support you and to be there for you and to put your heads together.

Two heads are better than one. They might have a perspective that you just didn't, you know, consider Yeah. Solution to a problem that you just would never have seen without their support. Mm-hmm. Plus, it also brings you closer together. Every time you choose not to share something with them, you put a brick in the wall between you.

It creates distance. It creates disconnection between you, and so by trying to protect them and not bring the problem to them, you're actually creating problems between you. You're creating a wall between you disconnection and distance between you. So when you bring whatever it is, whatever the fear is, whatever the problem is, whatever the feeling is, whatever the thing is.

You're trying to protect them from when you bring that to them, you're actually creating more connection, more intimacy in your relationship. Number four, grow together. Big one. This one is, and we've told this story several times over the course of the podcast, we'll tell an abbreviated version of it now, is that . When we first got into entrepreneurship, we did not understand the level of personal growth that we would have to do in corporate. We were able to go and be successful without having to really undertake a lot of personal growth, really any, really any, we could be successful climate, corporate ladder without ever having to dig in and do that work on ourselves.

In entrepreneurship, your business is really limited to the level of personal growth you're willing to do. We take, we vastly, vastly underestimated that. Vastly underestimated that. The thing is though, is that when we jumped in entrepreneurship, we ended up at, and it was kind of fluky that, how we ended up at this event, because we thought it was a real estate conference.

It ended up, it wasn't technically, it was more of a personal growth slash real estate hybrid. And if we had known that, I don't know if we would've went, but it ended up working in our favor. We were at this event and it was a, an incredibly vulnerable exercise that we had to do. And anyways, long story short, we ended up doing this thing together and we learned a lot about each other in this vulnerable exercise and that we uncovered some limiting beliefs that we both shared.

Mm-hmm. We didn't really know this consciously. We didn't know we had these, we didn't know the other person had them. And the limiting belief that we held was very similar in that we had a sense of unworthiness that we, you know, weren't good enough, weren't good enough. And both learning that about each other and being able to go through that exercise together and support each other through that was incredibly empowering.

It was incredibly bonding and , it forever changed our relationship. Yeah, we both grew as humans a lot from that event, but we grew closer together from doing it together and. What we see a lot of times, because personal growth is so foundational to business success and entrepreneurship, we often see a lot of entrepreneurs who dive into personal growth so that their business succeeds.

And if you start at the same place and one of you starts doing a lot of personal growth and the other one doesn't, you are growing further and further apart. So it's important as entrepreneurs. To grow together. It's important in your marriage to grow together. So read the same books, go to the same events, talk about the goals, make plans together.

Do the personal growth, do all the things that you're doing, grow together, do it together so that you actually grow together on the journey and you don't end up growing apart. Number five. Number five. This is a good one. This one is about showing up because entrepreneurship is hard, like super hard, and so there's gonna be bad days.

A lot of them. You're gonna have bad days where you're afraid a lot of the time where , you think you're failing, where like you're beating yourself up. You're just, you're gonna have bad days where things just aren't working and your mindset is just not where you want it to be and it everything feels hard.

That's gonna happen. Luckily, just by the odds you don't have them a lot of the time on the same day. Sometimes you will. Sometimes you won't sometimes, and when you do, it's really important to understand that who is having a worst day in that moment? Like who is really, really struggling? Because I might be having a bad day and see that she's also having a bad day and see that she's not handling it well.

Mm-hmm. Like she's really struggling with it. And so then it's on me to set aside my emotional response to a bad day. 'cause that's really all it is, is I'm saying it's the story we're telling herself. It's the story I'm telling yourself. So I have to take one for the team. Be the one that pulls us through.

And , it's just gonna take some sacrifice sometimes and showing up for the other person, even on days where it sucks for you. Mm-hmm. It really sucks. Like you feel like you got kicked in the teeth, but you can see that they also feel like they got kicked in the teeth and they're not handling that well and just suck it up.

Mm-hmm. And. Be there for them and to help move them through it and remind them of their greatness. Remind them of what you're doing this for, the big goals that you have, the dreams , and all of the success that you've had because , it's sometimes very easy to forget. And not see all of the good and all of the success when it feels like you're getting kicked in the teeth.

Mm-hmm. And entrepreneurship, there's a large percentage of the time you're feel like you're getting kicked in the teeth. I'm not gonna lie. It just is what it is. And when that happens, you're gonna need to remind each other of your greatness. And if you're having that, issue on the same day, one of you needs to take one for the team and pull the other one through.

Mm-hmm. And that's what being a team is all about is, is showing up in the moments that. Sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes it's just you're gonna take a sacrifice and like, you know, take one for the team and pull them through. And I think one thing , you usually remind me when we're in those moments is that we chose this.

Like sometimes you lose track of that. Like, this was a choice. We leaned into this, we chose this life. And on some days it is fantastic, and then other days it is really hard, but reminding each other that this is the life we chose, that we're doing this for something greater than ourselves. That we have a calling, like reminding you each other that, that this is a choice that we want to be doing this even when it's hard.

Sometimes it's hard to hear, but is really helpful to reframe the bad day and, and that it's just a bad day and it's only a bad day. 'cause that's the story I'm telling myself that it is, that it's a bad day and, yeah. 'cause good and bad is all just a judgment that you put on something. Mm-hmm. But the good days far outweigh the bad, and so it's just reminding each other of that when those moments come.

Even when you're also feeling like it's one of those batter days, but maybe someone else is having a batter than you day. So then you put aside the bad earnest and the badness and deal with the bad earnest. Yeah. Yeah. So we were a little bit inspired by a conversation we had yesterday, tips for married entrepreneurs, and these are the five that we think would be most helpful for married couples.

To be able to integrate the marriage and the business and keep both thriving. So what are you gonna implement today based on our little chitchat? What's one action you're gonna take? And also who are you gonna share this episode with? Like, I'm sure you know some, some entrepreneurs, I'm sure you know some married entrepreneurs.

This is really helpful stuff. So share this episode with a friend who would benefit from it. And we will see you next week for a very special episode. Episode 1 0 4, episode 1 0 4. That is two straight years for this Road of Life podcast. We've got a big announcement to make. Do. We're excited for next episode.

We're gonna walk through our well, I don't wanna surprise, I don't wanna spoil the surprise, but we're gonna walk through some cool stuff and, and yeah, we're gonna announce something cool. So we will see you next week. We'll see you next week.

Before we wrap up, we just want to remind you about something really special we've created. The Infinite Relationship Mastermind. It's like a VIP backstage pass for anyone looking to level up any and all of their relationships in their life. And we're not just talking about the relationship with your spouse.

Though it does include that one. We're also talking about the relationships with yourself, your friends, your business partners, your family, all the important people in your life. This mastermind is for anyone ready to take all of their relationships to a whole new level. Whether you're thriving and you want to thrive even more, or you're feeling a little stuck and need some extra love and support.

We host exclusive live courses. We create a safe, no judgment space where members can just open up and honestly just have a ton of fun connecting with other amazing people who are, building stronger, relationships. And to be honest, the transformations we've seen are incredible and it's exactly why we do what we do.

It fills our heart like nothing else. Now, we are super protective of this community because it is all about trust, love and support. So it's not for everybody, but if this does sound like it might tickle your fancy, then check out the link in the show notes and reach out to us if you have any questions, we'd love to chat and see if it's a fit for you.

And as always, thank you so much for being a part of our journey on The Road of life. And remember, you've got this, and we're here to help you every step of the way. So we'll see you next week. Bye for now..