Momentum Podcast: 255

Relationship And Business Growth

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

There are a lot of entrepreneurs that are convinced that having a great relationship and a great business are mutually exclusive. I can share from experience that this is most certainly not true.

Full Audio Transcript

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo. We are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be

Relationship and business growth. Far too many entrepreneurs have been convinced that this is a zero sum game. You can either have a relationship or you can have business growth, but if you try and have both, you're probably going to fail or you have to sacrifice one for the other, or you have to have your partner understand where you're coming from as an entrepreneur, or some other excuse for anything other than having a great relationship and a great business. I'm going to read you a question that I got and this question paraphrases, it summarizes, it reflects the question that I get often when I speak that I get through social media ,that I get on Facebook.

It's something like this, "I'd love to hear some insights to relationships as an entrepreneur, with family, friends, and more importantly spouses. This is something that I'm constantly struggling with in my life. I'm trying to work hard to build something awesome. However, I keep getting hit with the anti-momentum stick in my relationship. I try to show up to be the best I can, but as you know, as a starting out entrepreneur, there's nowhere near enough hours in a day and I'm struggling to show my vision and help my partner see the destination I see because I can't take the journey she is on right now. Would love your insights and any help you can give."

Well, here's the reality of being an entrepreneur and being in relationship. I'll give you advice, but a very small percentage of any entrepreneur I've ever given this advice to has ever taken it because here's the way I coach entrepreneurs who are in relationships, in marriages, whether it's a marriage or not, it doesn't matter to me. I coach relationships the same. Your relationship is first, number one, most important. And if you remember that, everything else will be okay.

In fact, I often joke with entrepreneurs, I have two rules for a married entrepreneur. Number one is your marriage is most important. Number two is a go back to number one because if you treat your marriage as though it's most important, if you align with your spouse, if you do what you need to do for your spouse, it means you're going to do everything in your business that you should be doing to be successful, and when your marriage is successful, here's what I know about you. If you're in a relationship, in a marriage, if you are with somebody, chances are you chose that person for a lot of reasons. You didn't take this lightly. You might've done it quickly. A lot of us do, but you didn't take it lightly and if you're with someone and struggling to stay with them because if it wasn't important to you, and they were in the way of your business, you'd just walk away.

But if you're struggling to stay with them, there's probably a valid reason, and if you're in a marriage I would say that your marriage is worth working for because the better you improve your marriage, the more your business will grow if you follow the process I'm going to share with you right now. And when it comes to married entrepreneurs, I want you to know something. I share the processes that work, not the ones that are fun. I share the strategies that actually improve the marriage and will help you grow the business at the same time. I share minimum effective dose, which means you're not going to do anything that hasn't been pre-thought out, that's not going to give you a tremendous amount of momentum. However, I don't rely on platitudes and BS. I will actually tell you what you need to do.

So let's start with if you want your relationship, if you want your spouse to be aligned with you, if you want them to know what's going on, then you have to have a process for continuous and constant alignment with your spouse. So if you work with your spouse, you should be having a everyday morning alignment. If you don't work with your spouse once a week, you should be sitting down and aligning and checking in every day. And if you are aligning in a system and sitting down and you understand what's going on, when you align and when you understand what each of you has coming up, where you can support each other, where either one of you needs help, you're going to eliminate a lot of the disagreements, a lot of the challenges that a lot of couples have.

So by having a process for alignment, by actually sitting down and following a checklist for alignment, I know this sounds crazy, but Cadey and I absolutely do. We literally follow a step by step process because here's something that's interesting about being married. Anytime you sit down to plan, anytime you sit down to talk about the relationship, anytime you sit down to do anything that has importance to the relationship, it's very likely that tension goes up, and it's very likely that it becomes a loaded situation. It becomes more difficult.

There's a lot of emotion in a relationship. There's a lot of emotion around planning. There's a lot of emotion around what you're doing. There's a lot of ... For us as entrepreneurs, there's a lot of feeling in our momentum and so if we don't have a process for alignment, we will forget to align with our spouse. We will forget to align in our relationship, and if we forget to align in the relationship that's most important to us, we'll do that across the board. When we're aligning with our spouse, when they understand what's going on with us, at least we have accountability to somebody.

That's step number one. Now, number two, share enough with your spouse so that they understand enough about what you're doing to support you. Now, don't turn me off because I know you just rolled your eyes. If you're in the situation where your spouse isn't supporting you, you're thinking, "Oh, come on. There's no way I could share enough so that they would actually support me." Well, let me explain what I mean by that. Here's the issue for most spouses who are with entrepreneurs trying to pursue a career in business or trying to get a business off the ground or trying to start their own deal or trying to get out of their nine to five is that most entrepreneurs who are in that situation, and maybe even this person who asked me the question, don't really know where they're going. So they're doing a bunch of stuff, but they can't explain to their spouse where they're really going and I want you to understand something about that. It's inexcusable.

If you're just going without really understanding where, if you don't have a clear understanding with forward planning of what you're eliminating in your path next, what you're achieving next, what you're going towards next, how you're going to finally have something come out of your career, out of the business that you're running, if you don't have that and you can't share it with you spouse and you can't share it with yourself, then you don't really know where you're going and you're deluding yourself. Because if you're sitting down as an entrepreneur and working hard every day and hoping a business comes out of it, any type of success will be in the very, very minority. But if you have a forward planning system and you understand where you're going and you can share that with your spouse, you're going to create momentum not only in your marriage, in your relationship, but in your business as well, because most entrepreneurs share very little about where they're going. I'm sure the person who asked me this question is probably in that group.

Because here's what happens. We share very little about where we're going because we don't really understand it yet. That's a mistake we make as entrepreneurs. We don't actually sit down and plan. We do a lot of ready, fire, aim instead of ready, aim, fire. And so because we share very little, then we start ... Then maybe we do share with our spouse and what we don't get supported. Then we start edit sharing. We only tell them about what's really going on ... Or sorry, the good things that are going on, not what's really going on. We don't tell them about how we're really feeling. Instead we edit. We make it sound better. We make it sound like we're really okay when maybe we're not, and then what happens is the spouse knows, your spouse knows you're not communicating everything.

And if you do that, they're going to have a feeling of deception. That's a feeling of deception, of infidelity, of you cheating on them with the business. That will drive you ... That will drive a wedge between you, that'll drive pain between you. So if you have a forward planning process and you have an alignment process and you're telling your spouse where you're going and you're sitting down in aligning with your spouse and they know when they can count on you to do that, you're going to lower a tremendous amount of the pressure and noise in your business.

And here's the last one. Sit Down with your spouse and look at your net worth. Sit down and add up everything you owe, everything you have, figure out what your net worth is, and as a couple agree on what your net worth goal is. Where is it going to be in a year, and then pursue it for the year by following what you're spending each month and talking about money. You'll eliminate the number one subject that most people have a hard time with in their marriages.

One of the ... It's the single largest contributor to divorce is money, so if you align on a net worth goal and you sit down every month and you look at how much you spent, how much you made, and how much you're left with, that will keep that discussion out in the open and you'll be forced to align on it rather than fight about it and have explosions. And if you're the entrepreneur who's pursuing the business and your net worth is consistently going down, this meeting becomes increasingly crucial for you. This review becomes increasingly crucial for you because you need someone to call you out when it's time to pull up and look at reality, because far too often we don't want to align on this stuff because we know we're headed off a cliff, and as entrepreneurs we need to be accountable to someone and it may as well be the most important person in the world, our spouse,

So if you want relationship and business growth, these tactics, they're not easy. They really aren't, but with time, they become easier. And with time they can become a part of what gives you momentum and what aligns you as a couple in your marriage and what connects you and your spouse. I know these, for Cadey and I, have been invaluable. So the first one is a process for alignment. The second one is you have a forward planning process where you are sharing where you're going. You're showing your spouse your waterfall. They know what's going on. They understand, they know what's happening in the business so that they can support you. And then you align on your net worth goal.

And here's the reality about those three is that they are not only the most effective, they're probably the hardest because they are the most effective. They will force results and you will improve your marriage. So here's the question, how bad do you really want it? Are you ready to be the entrepreneur you've always known you could be? Are you ready to take your business and your relationship to the next level? Do you know there's been more people that you could help, more contribution you can make, or do you know that there's just more you should be putting out there?

If all those things are true, then follow these three steps because they are only going to help you. They're only going to move you in the right direction and they're only going to help you and your spouse create a ton of momentum. And if you're ready for the process that will help you do this. If you want to see the exact strategies you can use to align with your spouse, go to MomentumMasterclass.com. Check out our course that is all about increasing the momentum in your life, optimizing yourself as an entrepreneur, understanding where to focus on right now like lasers so that you can move forward and have the life that you've wanted and make the contribution you know you can. MomentumMasterclass.com.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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