In the midst of our Boardroom team health interviews, we perform a lot of anonymous interviews with the team members are their spouses. A lot of times, we don’t realize that what we do can hurt your team members or their families. We are hard-chargers, we are so driven, we tend to forget all of this stuff.
Here is what I’m learning, having been through this myself and getting feedback from the people who interviewed my wife, and now being a part of the interview process with other people’s spouses, and giving that feedback, I’ve found that it’s important to avoid doing the following 5 things
When you’re working, work. When you’re not working, don’t work. It sounds simple, but we constantly need to remind ourselves of this because we are such go-getters, that it can be difficult to intentionally pay attention to what really matters in life.
Think about this one - it may sound harmless, but you put rules in place for a reason. Why would you intentionally put someone in that spot to decide whether to let you break the rule? It also puts the people you do this to at a really low level. It’s never OK!
What would a world-class _____ do? (Fill in the blank). That’s the question I found myself asking myself over and over. A world-class husband would not go 50%, would not go tit for tat, I would try to show up 100%, 100% of the time.
This is mainly for men - in old times, like hunter-gatherer old times, the women would go out while the men went out, and they’d have meadow reports where they’d tell each other where things were and what was the best course of action. Women need to download their entire day to their husbands and it’s really meaningful to them - so make time for it.
Many times, my faith comes first, then my family, then my business. If you look at my calendar, though, you wouldn’t see that as much. You can see things in my calendar that are for each, but the business has been the primary thing in my calendar for a while. Most of the time our priorities are completely out of whack. Spouses constantly feel like they’re taking second place to everything that’s going on.
The above list is the result of interviewing a bunch of spouses on the topic of being married to a business owner. If you can manage to avoid doing these 5 things, you’ll be a lot better off in your marriage as well as your business.
