Yellow flag likes damp or marshy ground. So don't park your car there :).
How entrepreneurs
can succeed at work without blowing up their marriages
5 Gifts for Building a Great Relationship with Your
Spouse
Michael Hyatt
If I had a dollar for every time people asked my wife,
Gail, how she lives with an entrepreneur,
I wouldn’t have to be one. Scratch that. I
would probably figure out how to get more people
to ask the question. (Sorry, I can’t help myself!)
Being an entrepreneur is part of who I am. And that
creates some interesting challenges
and opportunities in our marriage. If you are—or are
married to—an entrepreneur,
corporate executive, ministry leader, or any other kind
of driven,
“Type A” personality, you know what I mean.
Making Marriage
Work
Gail and I approach marriage with a few basic
assumptions:
Marriage attracts opposites;
Marriage takes work;
Marriage is a long-term project; and
Marriage works best when each party serves the other.
The attraction is the easy part, isn’t it? It’s those
other words—work, project, serve—
where the challenges come in. But that’s also where we
find the opportunities.
So how can we work through the challenges and take
advantage of the opportunities?
Gail and I have had thirty-six years to work out the
kinks.
What we’ve discovered is that it comes down to an
exchange of gifts.
I’m not talking jewellery and surprise vacations.
There’s nothing wrong with those, but I’m talking about
something far more valuable.
There are five gifts each partner can give to the other
to help build a happy marriage.
5 Gifts from
Spouses to Entrepreneurs
If you are married to an entrepreneur, you can help him
or her (and yourself)
by giving these five gifts. Gail came up with this list.
I would characterize these as gifts of support:
The gift of
belief. There is a lot of risk in the entrepreneurial life.
I’m someone who struggles with fear and doubt, and it
makes all the difference for Gail to say,
“You have what it takes”—especially when I lose sight of
that myself.
The gift of
appreciation. Facing all that risk can be taxing.
But when I see my sacrifices are appreciated, it lights
my fire.
Gratitude from Gail motivates me like nothing else. It
also makes me deeply grateful for her.
The gift of
affirmation. The entrepreneurial lifestyle involves long hours,
sometimes away from home. It would be easy for Gail to go
negative.
But by affirming what she loves about me—those things
that attracted her in the first place—
it enables both of us to stay positive. And that means
when we have to have tough conversations, we have the relational equity we need
to grow, not crumble.
The gift of perspective. The
intense focus of entrepreneurs enables massive creativity
and achievement, but it can come at the cost of
perspective. I can easily think that everything
in my world rises or falls with the next project. Gail
keeps the wide angle I sometimes lose.
The gift of
commitment. Given the risk inherent to the entrepreneurial lifestyle,
some of the most important words we can hear are, “We’re
in this together.”
I love hearing that from Gail.
Communicating that kind of commitment can get a couple through
almost anything.
I’ve received all of these gifts in abundance from Gail.
And I’m convinced I wouldn’t have
the resources I need without them. They are a huge part
of my success—even my sanity.
But this is only half the picture.
5 Gifts from Entrepreneurs to Their Spouses
A great marriage requires investment from both parties.
So how do entrepreneurs
achieve their dreams without sabotaging their marriage in
the process? If you are the entrepreneur in your marriage, you can help your
spouse (and yourself) by giving him or her these five gifts:
The gift of honor. Our
spouses are more important than our work, whatever that work may be.
To give this gift, we esteem and value what our spouses
esteem and value. We give priority
to their priorities, and use our words to praise and
uplift, especially when our spouses are absent.
The gift of
awareness. It’s easy in the hyper focus of hard-drivers to see
themselves as the center
of the show. We’re not—no matter how much money we make.
We need to be aware of
all the material and nonmaterial contributions our
spouses make to our lives.
The gift of
inclusion. Including our spouses in our businesses creates intimacy,
builds trust,
and brings us together. Whether it’s just receiving input
or counsel, or getting into the nitty-gritty details of the business, our
marriages win if we keep our spouses in the loop.
The gift of
commitment. We talked about this in the previous list.
But this is an essential gift for both spouses to give
and receive.
It’s critical to make this commitment concrete and
observable in our actions.
The gift of trust. Because
the entrepreneurial life is risky, it’s easy to default to fear.
So many things can go wrong. To counter that, we can
over-function and become workaholics.
That ends up taking, not giving. Instead, we can
bless our spouse by realizing it doesn’t all hang on our solitary
shoulders—something that goes back to developing an attitude of abundance.
Keeping the Trend Line up and to the Right
I said at the beginning that marriage is a life-long
project. In business we talk about growth
as keeping the revenue trend moving up and to the right.
It’s the same thing here.
I want my marriage to be constantly improving, always
going to the next level.
If marriage involves opposites, it’s going to involve
some friction. But what if instead of seeing friction in our marriages as a
challenge, we saw it as an opportunity? I
nstead of striking the same note, we can make some
beautiful harmonies.
Marriage involves opposites. That means either friction
or some beautiful harmonies.
Tweet Quote
These simple but priceless gifts have seen us through
more than three decades of marriage so far. We’ve never been perfect, but our
marriage has never been better. Of course, this only scratches the surface.
Gail and I have an in-depth, three-part conversation about these gifts and how
they work in our marriage on my podcast. You can listen to the episodes here (part
1, part
2, and part
3).
We really believe it’s possible to accomplish our
entrepreneurial dreams,
our leadership dreams, without blowing up our marriages.
Better than that, we can have great marriages if we’re
proactive—and generous.
http://michaelhyatt.com/how-to-marry-an-entrepreneur.html
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