Great Relationships Will Give You Less Guilt In Your Business

Today I’m going to dive much deeper into personal than I will with business but if you’re thinking this won’t help you in your business, you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s so important that things at home are great so that it doesn’t negatively impact what we’ve got going on in our business! When you have great relationships at home, it will give you less guilt while working on your business and can lead to a more understanding spouse and when you work together as a team (even if he isn’t in your business!) your business will majorly benefit. I don’t want a successful business and be all by myself and I don’t know about you but I want to have it all. I want the successful business and the amazing family life too.  

I love goal setting but for some reason when I set goals they are all business related. I pick goals to make a certain amount of money this year, grow my email list to X amount of people or impact a certain amount of people. Rarely do I have outside areas of my life in my top 3 goals. Sometimes I feel guilt around the fact that this is my reality. Should something with the family be in there or should I be thinking about something for my husband Kent and me? I feel like that area is good because I married a really great guy and we have 2 beautiful girls and I feel really good about my personal life.

I think when it comes to business, I get really inspired because there is so much room for improvement and there are numbers we can track and measure. We can measure growth, we can see real numbers, revenue, customers, profit, loss, and so on but when it comes to us being a great wife or mom, there is not a way to quantify that. Because of that I feel that I haven’t been as focused on trying to improve there. I haven’t ever felt the need to be better in that area.

Recently, I was at a Tony Robbins event and I purchased some of his audio programs. There was a discount for buying 2, 3, or 4, so I purchased 4 and I was stuck on what the 4th one should be. The sales woman said why don’t you buy the relationship program. people love that one and she could tell by the look on my face I wasn’t sold. I told her I was a coach and she said you know, she was also a coach and one thing she found was a lot of her clients had problems in their relationship.

Sometimes they needed to work on their relationship so it didn’t negatively affect their business ad that I might learn some tools in here that could help my clients. I actually thought that was a really good point, so I bought it for my clients, not for myself.  First, let’s recognize how in the world was I that girl? I didn’t need the program, but I could think of other people that did. I hate being that girl and we need to recognize and observe how often we are that girl.

Then one of the activities we did was listing 7 different areas in order of importance. One of the areas was love and I had that pretty low as one of my motivators. I think for me I have a loving husband, a very close family, my children are borderline obsessed with me and I think I feel love so much that I sometimes don’t value it because it’s such a part of my normal life. But I can tell you if I didn’t have the love of my husband, kids or family, it would be one of the things I would want the most. I had this realization that it’s really important to me but I don’t appreciate it as much as I should.

Having this breakthrough at the event, I came home on a mission to fully engage and make sure that I do everything I can to keep that love growing. On the drive home from Chicago to Milwaukee, I decided to play the relationship audio course. I listened to Tony and Sage talk about 4 different levels of relationships. The highest level- 4 was two people who were extremely passionate with one another, couldn’t keep their hands off each other and almost feels like they are still in the honeymoon stage. Level 1 was two people living in the same house but there’s no connection or passion, they are simply just roommates. For the first time I was able to grade my own relationship. In my eyes we were a 3 out of 4. It was a number, a way to quantify how good I was doing, a score to tell me if I was hitting it out of the ballpark or barely making it. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

I was thrilled there being a grading system but definitely not ecstatic about being a 3 out of 4. I like to win, I’m one of those people you do not want to play a board game with!! I take things way to seriously and can suck the fun right out of it unless I’m winning and this was all I needed to hear to realize that I needed to work on my relationship. The honeymoon stage was great and lasted a few years but we’ve been married for 10 years, been together for 14 years, have 2 kids, a bunch of businesses and life can be crazy overwhelming sometimes.

I realized that we no longer kiss everyday. In the past when he would leave for work, we would kiss and say I love you and sometimes we don’t even get to see each other before he goes to work. I didn’t like that and it’s funny how you look up and realize when did this start or stop happening? My focus is on my work and that’s clear and needs to change. I don’t want to wake up one day with a crazy successful business and a husband that wants a divorce and now I only get to see my kids 50% of the time. I better make sure that I’m fully working on a relationship with my husband. I love my husband and I love my children but if you had to rank the order of importance of those 3 areas of my life and I wasn’t able to do it, but an observer had to look at my life and decide, I guarantee they would have said she puts work first, kids second, husband third.

That is so messed up and if we don’t get those in the right order things are going to take a turn for the worse. The relationship program talked about women putting their kids in front of their husband and how when your kids leave the house and it’s just you and your husband, it’s going to be really hard to learn how to reconnect. You can’t just put your time and energy into your kids and forget about your spouse.

So how was I going to get him to listen to this audio course? I knew that was probably not going to happen so I listened to the entire course on my own without telling him, (he still doesn’t know unless he happens to read this and I seriously doubt this is his jam!!). So I just started to be more intentional and after realizing we don’t kiss everyday, I made sure when he said he was leaving for work, I got up out of my office and walked over to kiss him and say goodbye. It only took a few days in a row for him to come over to me to kiss me goodbye and say I love you. It was an immediate change that I saw. It’s crazy how one little thing can have an affect on so much more.

I started to see a difference and realized we were improving, so I did what I would normally do with any business strategy. I became a little bit more obsessed and started studying it more. I recently bought the book the 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman where he talks about the 5 different ways we experience love and how we all have love tanks that need to be full and we usually have a preferred type of love language.

The 5 are – acts of service, gifts, physical touch, quality time, and affirmations. If you’re constantly doing things around the house to show your husband love but all he wants is quality time, his love tank will slowly start to empty. In the honeymoon stage we are most likely doing all 5 but after a while, some of those completely fade away and if the ones they need are the ones that fade, your relationship is in trouble.

I’ve known about this book for a long time but I never took it because I thought I understood and knew what mine was. After reading it, I realized that mine changed and so did my husbands. They also have a free quiz you can take at the 5lovelanguages.com and my top two were tied – quality time and acts of service. I got my husband to take it and he tied for his top two which were acts of service and physical touch. Here is why this is so powerful…

We both love acts of service which is so good to know because unless we’re both helping around the house one of us is going to be mad. So I realized we could use a better system for who does what and I would love to set up some guidelines in place so we both feel that we are not doing anything alone. It also made me realize, maybe we should outsource a little more. Knowing that he likes if I do the dishes or laundry definitely did not make me excited!! I realized that if we both value that so much than maybe we need to spend a little more money to have some of these things taken care of.

Right now we have a housekeeper come in every other week, but maybe that needs to be someone weekly that can help with laundry and take that off our plate. Another red-flag was his #1 was physical touch and that was my #5. That means it’s going to take some effort on my part to make sure his love tank is full. Again, this was another way for me to look at numbers and grade ourselves and see where we can improve. The big question is what’s most important to you? Then I want to ask you, if I were to watch you all day for one day and I was in your home observing you, would I agree with what you said was your biggest priority?

If you haven’t read this book, it’s a super short read! I read it over the weekend and then I immediately began to implement strategies and saw a difference. I also purchased the audio book for the 5 Love Languages of Children. Kids are the same way. They have love tanks and certain things they appreciate more and it’s important to make sure you’re doing all 5 but to find out what makes them feel the most loved.

One suggestion in the book was ask your child to draw a picture of mom and dad showing them love, how or when do they feel most loved. If they don’t know, ask them a few examples. Do you like when we play on the playground together? Do you like when mom comes home from a business trip and brings you a gift? Keep giving either-or statements and give examples. You will start to see patterns and which ones your child appreciates more.

I realized that quality time was my daughter Tanner’s highest need and that night I sat on the ground and played with a new toy Tanner just got for her birthday. The next morning when she woke up she immediately asked if I would play with her again. She typically asks to play with her iPad. Tanner did not bring up her iPad from Sunday-Tuesday, 3 whole days without it mentioned and I think it’s because I was playing with her. She asked on Wednesday and I reflected as to why, and I realized because I was busy. I was too busy to play and she knew that. I will absolutely be more intentional now that I know what her love language is.

Just like when you go on dates, are you present? Are you on your phone the entire time? Don’t just check off date night on your to-do list and think you’re actually growing as a couple. Trust me, I’m guilty of all of these things too. Now again, these books are by Gary Chapman, some he co-authors but you will find them all by typing in his name. I hope I’m getting some of you to really realize you need to invest just as much time if not more into these other areas of your life as you do with your business.

I now realize that there are so many things we as a family can be improving on which will lead into other positive results in other areas. When you have a great personal life that makes your business less stressful. Don’t agree? Well, when you are stressed at home, it definitely negatively impacts your business and it for sure works the opposite direction too.

Now…part of me is super self-conscious even talking about this, because in my head I’m telling myself people don’t care about this stuff why are you sharing? I still go through my own imposture syndrome of why are you sharing this? SO…big favor!! If you loved this episode, share your feedback or tag me on Instagram because I want to hear from you!