Transcript

Episode: How to Have Two Successful Careers in One Happy Home

Michael Hyatt: Hey, guys! When you’re experiencing growth in your organization, you can’t do everything on your own, and you don’t have to! With the help of our friends at BELAY, you can simplify your life with an assistant and stop doing it all. For our podcast listeners, BELAY is offering their free download of 25 Things You Can Delegate to an Assistant Today. Just text LEADTOWIN (all one word) to 31996. Again, that’s LEADTOWIN (all one word) to 31996. Thanks!

Megan Hyatt Miller: Hi, I’m Megan Hyatt Miller, and this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. In this episode, we’re talking about a subject that every two-career household has to face. How do you have two successful careers in one happy marriage?

This is the first in a mini-series of three episodes about topics I’m really passionate about that I’m going to bring some special guests in to discuss these things with me, but today I’m joined by my husband, Joel Miller, who happens to be our Chief Content Officer here at Michael Hyatt & Company. Hey, Joel!

Joel Miller: Hey!

Megan: Hey, babe! Should I say babe?

Joel: Totally!

Megan: Joel, I don’t know. What’s appropriate?

Joel: I like babe.

Megan: Okay. I’m going to go with that. What do you think about this topic?

Joel: You know, if you think back several generations, there were much more simply defined gender roles, work roles, and the kind of responsibilities of what a husband might do or what a wife might do. They were just more obvious for people, and in that obviousness, there was just an ability to not even have to think about it. That’s not true, really, any longer, and it hasn’t been true for the last couple of generations, maybe, and certainly not the last generation.

I remember when I was a kid having a woman teacher reference the fact that my mom was an accountant and that was strange, because most women were not professionals in their circle. The fact that a woman could be a teacher was an acceptable job, but it was, perhaps, odd that somebody might be an accountant.

I was young and not really aware of anything. Now that I’m older, I remember that story, and I think that has probably been true for countless women who have had to kind of make their way and figure that out, but not only do they have to make their way and figure that out, but men and women together have to figure out what that looks like in a marriage, and I think that’s an interesting topic.

Megan: That’s right. Well, we’ve certainly made our fair share of mistakes and learned some really valuable lessons over the years. We’re going to talk about that a little bit, but today we want to show you how to cooperate on family life so that you both win at work and succeed at life, especially at home. To help us do that, our writer, Larry Wilson, is here joining us as usual. Larry, welcome!

Larry Wilson: Hey, guys! It’s great to be with you.

Megan: Hey, Larry!

Larry: Just for today, could you guys address me as Dr. Phil? I feel like this is an episode about couples’ counseling. I want to just say a quick word to the men in the audience. Pay attention to this episode, because you have some interesting research here that couples have less conflict, more satisfying relationships, and more sex when both partners contribute substantially to household chores. So we’re talking about equity in roles here, and there are some reasons you want to pay attention.

Maybe more than that is that couples have a 48 percent lower chance of divorce than others when both partners are contributing more or less equally to household chores and financially in the marriage, so there are some really good reasons to make this work on both sides.

Megan: Wow! That’s pretty compelling research. I can neither confirm nor deny that this may or may not be true for us.

Larry: Well, you can cut that out if you want to, but if you want to get men to pay attention there is one good way to do it.

Joel: I’d say leave it in.

Larry: There must have been a time when you realized blending two professional families was going to be a challenge. How did this really come to a head for you or become something that you felt like you needed to pay attention to, or was it always?

Megan: Well, there was kind of a funny story that I think was a catalyst for us in figuring this out. It was not long after I became the Chief Operating Officer here at Michael Hyatt & Company. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was really on my mind that we needed to divide things up equally and that I was kind of doing that thing professional women often do where I was over-functioning, and I was still trying to be functionally a stay-at-home mom while running a business.

That was just not going to work, so I decided the thing to throw down on was landscaping. I told Joel that I really needed his help, and I wanted him to take over managing our landscaping. We had a vendor we needed to use, because it was just out of control. Neither of us had time to do it at this point.

We had these bushes that were on either side of our driveway, and they were just really getting out of control. Every day I would come home and see them, and I was frustrated, so I said, “Honey, I need you to take this over. I want you to call this guy, Justin, and get going on it and get him out here.”

Well, it turns out that the contractor was slow to come out. Then, he dropped the ball. Anyway, eight weeks go by, and these bushes are not getting trimmed. By this point, I have a Suburban I’m driving (a big car in a kind of narrow driveway). The bushes are hitting my car every time I drive down the driveway. Every time I drive home from work down the driveway, I’m madder and madder and madder.

Finally, it ended in a big fight. I was like, “I have to have help with this stuff! You have to make this happen!” It was really a line in the sand. It’s kind of a funny thing. It was a line in the sand. Really, you were doing your best because the guy just wasn’t calling you back and all of that, but it was really difficult for us.

Joel: It was tense. It was only bushes, but sometimes bushes are more than bushes.

Megan: Sometimes bushes are more than bushes.

Joel: Yeah. That was tricky, because the guy (the vendor) we thought was the right guy. He had come out. He had specced the job. He had a vision for what the property could look like, and that was really attractive. Then, he just kind of fell off the face of the earth and stopped returning calls. It was like I felt almost trapped. We had sort of this soft agreement that we were going to do this. Then, he walked away. Meanwhile, your anger is mounting by the day, and figuring out how to navigate that was just crazy.

Megan: I think for me what it symbolized was that I felt like in the end I still had to own everything. I had to own the thinking and the management of everything on the home front, and I was really overwhelmed and exhausted. I think that was the core issue. It just felt really unfair and inequitable. I think that was the defining moment for us and when we had to start figuring it out on a different level.

Joel: I think that’s right. I think one of the challenges in a moment like that and one of the things that sparks probably so much of the frustration is that there are all of these unexpressed assumptions or unexpressed feelings or expectations, and until they get expressed and until they get shared and until they get objectified and worked on together they can just kind of spin on their own inside of ourselves and then go sideways on each other.

Larry: Well, today we are saying that executives and professionals who are married to each other can have a strong and successful partnership by taking four actions together. I think a key word there is together. These are co-actions or co-operations. The first action is just what you said, Joel, to talk about it and to make it explicit.

Joel: Yeah. I think this is one of those things that seem super obvious, but it’s actually really not that obvious, because we talked at the beginning about some of those gender roles or the assumptions that are socially inherited that drive the way we just think and act usually without any great conscious thought.

They’re just kind of engrained in us, so when we approach a problem or a situation with those assumptions, we don’t talk about them hardly ever, or if we do talk about them, they undergird the conversation and they’re never questioned themselves. What you end up with there are maybe competing visions for how things are supposed to work that never are actually objectified so you can look at them together, and that only happens because of conversation.

Megan:  Well, I think inherited is a good word for it, because inherited is kind of adjacent also to unconscious. You inherit this thing that you’re not even fully aware of, but it becomes the underpinning of your expectations, and that’s what’s really driving the bus here. The conflict is you have two sets of expectations that are largely unexamined, and they’re colliding with each other. I think talking about it can feel overwhelming. It can feel scary. It can feel like there is a lot at stake.

For example, I think for men it could be really easy if you grew up in a home where the roles were traditional. You may just assume it’s natural that your wife is going to manage the home front even if she’s a professional. Not even consciously you’ve thought that. You just kind of default to that.

Maybe she started out as a stay-at-home mom and then later transitioned into a career. That can be really problematic because she may be feeling like that’s her expectation of herself, too, at some level, but it’s just not realistic. There is too much work to do. Bringing those things up can be really scary if you haven’t done it before.

Joel: Yeah. The truth is if they’re not aired you just end up with this ongoing tangle of these unquestioned assumptions, and because they’re unquestioned, they feel certain. “Somebody is supposed to be doing this thing. Somebody is supposed to be doing that other thing.”

Because they’re supposed to do something and they’re not doing it, or they’re supposed to do it and they’re doing a poor job of it, it ends up creating resentment. It ends up creating a feeling of judgment. It also ends up for the person who maybe is not able to live up to those expectations creating feelings of inferiority and failure and all of that, and all of that is completely unnecessary.

Megan: I think what we’re going for here is an honest negotiation and an open negotiation of what needs to be done and how we’re going to get it done, but you kind of have to broach the subject first. You have to be willing to have that conversation, and very often, our conflict avoidance causes us to just want to tough it out.

“We’ll just keep going. We don’t have time to talk about this right now. We have kids. We have this project at work, so I’ll do dinner again tonight, or I’ll take the kids to the doctor’s appointment,” or whatever the point of tension is, but pretty soon it builds up and you have a real problem on your hands.

Larry: Joel and Megan, here’s a concept I want to get your opinion on. Jennifer Petriglieri, in her book Couples That Work, mentions a concept called couple contracting. She says that this involves in-depth discussions in three areas between partners: values, boundaries, and fears.

She goes on to say negotiating and finding common ground in all three gives couples borders and direction for the path they will walk together. She refers to that as contracting. How does that strike you? Is that what you’re talking about (making a contract together or a deal)?

Joel: It is kind of like a deal, because, if you think about it, all of those inherited social norms are all deals, too. They just got struck without your awareness, and you’re just operating in terms of that contract. Now that the contract is a little problematic to employ or maybe not even tenable in your own relationship, you have to kind of open it up and renegotiate it.

Megan: Right. I like that idea. I haven’t read that book, but I’d like to. I think those are good categories, especially when you consider the fact that, really, emotions are part of what make this conversation so difficult. At the end of the day, deciding who is going to unload the dishwasher and who is going to pick up the kids and who is going to take the dog to the vet are not in and of themselves inherently emotionally charged.

It’s kind of what we believe those things represent and who should do them and why we think a certain person should do them that is where the difficulty is, so I really like that, and I like thinking about a vision for your marriage and your partnership before you even get into this, because I think if you have a perspective of equality that is really big and kind of exciting like, “What could we do together if we were both 100 percent all in here?” and we weren’t just pushing stuff off on one person, what would that mean for us?

Joel: Yeah. I think the other side of equality, which sounds very angular at one level, is generosity. I remember reading an article by Emily Smith in the Atlantic years ago now called “Masters of Love.” I think that’s what the title was. It was about the way relationships work in terms of the most successful relationships.

These scholars looked at marriages that were really successful, and they called those folks the masters, and they looked at folks who were not so great, and they called those folks the disasters. If you wanted to be a master of love versus the disaster, kindness and generosity were the operative things that popped out in these relationships. When you think about generosity as a part of equality, like, “I’m going to give in order to help make this work,” I think that’s the easiest way to approach what equality might look like.

Megan: I love that, and I think that’s one of the things you have done really well and modeled in our marriage. We’ve been married, by the way, for just about 11 years. We have five kids, so we have some water under the bridge there, but I think you have done a great job of choosing kindness and choosing generosity when you could have chosen something else, and I think that goes a long way to building trust for this conversation we’re talking about.

By the way, if you’re thinking, “All of that is great, and I’m in, but how do I start this conversation?” here are a few tips for you. First of all, you need to practice self-awareness. Before you even get to the place of, “Honey, we need to have a conversation about this,” you need to ask yourself, “What am I feeling? Why am I feeling that? What’s not working for me right now?” Get some perspective on your own internal landscape before you show up at this conversation.

Joel: Yeah. You actually do this well for me, which is to challenge my narratives. I have 62 stories going in my head at any one time, and at least four of them are true, and you have a really good way of just asking me the kind of questions that enable me to get to that place of self-awareness where I’m actually questioning things in a useful way.

The real question is…Can you do that on your own? Because you need to do it on your own sometimes. When you walk into a conversation and you’re not self-aware, that’s sort of like walking into a room with the lights off. You’re going to bump into the furniture.

Megan: That’s a good point. You also need to assume positive intent in your partner. This is a concept that comes out of one of our favorite business books called The Loyalist Team. It’s an idea where you’re committed to speaking candidly to each other and to telling each other the truth, but you’re doing it from a basis of trust.

You assume always that the other person has your best interest at heart, that they want good things for you, and their intentions were positive even if the outcome or the actions that followed those things were misguided or problematic in some way, which often they are, because we’re people.

When you look at your spouse and you say, “I trust that you want what’s best for me and you have my best interest at heart, and even though we’re not aligned on this right now and it’s not working, I trust who you are even if I don’t like what you’re doing right now,” that’s a really good place to start from.

Joel: Well, if you know there is a pre-commitment to kindness and generosity in your partner, then it’s really easy to trust them. Even if, like you said, there is disagreement or misalignment, you at least know they want what is best for you. You at least know they want to give and be generous. If in that moment there is no clear path to that or if in that moment that generosity failed somehow, that’s not a deep crisis. That’s just a circumstantial problem that needs to be solved.

Megan: Yeah! From there, you need to find a time and schedule it when you’re relaxed and uninterrupted. This is not a conversation to have when you’re cleaning up after dinner and the kids are needing to go to bed and somebody is fussy because it’s about time for their bottle.

You do not want to do this in the middle of that moment because you’re in the throes of the conflict itself and you need to have some perspective. Schedule a time to do it when the kids are taken care of and when you can just be away together in some way so that you’re able to focus on it.

Joel: Yep. I agree.

Megan: Then, enter the conversation non-defensively. This is really hard. I mean, you have to sort of pep talk yourself before you go into the conversation.

Joel: And in the conversation.

Megan: And in the conversation there needs to be a constant dialogue or monologue in your head that’s coaching you to not be defensive and to also be aware of where you’re digging your heels in and where you’re inclined to be selfish even (I think that’s a big thing here) or even where you’re just defending your ground.

Come into the conversation non-defensively and ask your spouse to suspend judgment and listen to you while you’re talking. This is hard for me. You’re actually better at this than I am. When I’m really fired up about a point, I can talk over you, and it takes me a minute to remember, “Just shut up, and listen.”

Joel: This is a really tricky thing, because when you have a sense that you’re right about something, you want it to be known that you’re right. You want people to recognize that you have a point. You want people to recognize that your position is valid, but there is also another side of it, which is that you could stipulate anything for the sake of a conversation.

If you just stipulated the other person’s position long enough to hear it out and if you just stipulated it long enough to see what the ramifications were of it, does it really cost you anything? The answer is, “Probably not,” and certainly what it gets you is the chance of validating the other person in the conversation.

If the other person feels validated, they’re going to come to the rest of the conversation with a sense they don’t have as much to lose or they may be able to give on their own. If they’re coming from a place of defensiveness, there is no ground to give, because everything you give at that point feels painful.

Megan: I think that’s true.

Mike Boyer: Hey, everybody! Mike Boyer here. A shout out this week goes to Clint Sanders who left this five-star review on iTunes. He simply said, “I can’t get enough of the leadership lessons from this podcast.” Thanks, Clint. We’re glad you love the show, and we’d love to hear from you, too.

If you haven’t reviewed Lead to Win, would you take a moment and do that now? It takes just a minute and it helps a great deal to keep the program visible for other leaders. You’re not sure how to leave a review? Just check the show notes at leadto.win. We also provide a complete transcript of today’s show and a list of resources mentioned on the program. That’s all at leadto.win. Now, back to the show.

Larry: So the first action you need to take together if you want to create a strong partnership in your home of two married professionals is to talk about it. At the end of that time, you should have some clarity about your own feelings and about what your partner is experiencing in the marriage. The first action is to talk about it. The second action is to focus on equity and not fairness. Now, that one surprises me a little. Focus on equity and not fairness. I always thought those were the same thing.

Joel: Growing up, my dad always used to tell me to never use the F-word in his house, and he meant fair. When I as a child would say, “That’s not fair,” he would say, “Don’t use the F-word in my house.” I think fairness is like an intuitively obvious thing. It’s a good thing. I mean, we all love that things are fair, unless we could have it be unfair and in our favor, which is probably what we’d like better if we were honest with ourselves.

Equity and fairness, I think, are different, and they happen to be more situational. Equity happens to be more situational. It’s more negotiated. Fairness is really about all of those inherited assumptions and whether or not we’re living up to them or not living up to them.

Megan: It’s also accounting. I think fairness is accounting.

Joel: Totally! Equity is more like negotiating in the moment. It’s more like jazz than classical music. It’s going to be give and take, and it’s going to be, “How can we make this work for us right now?” It’s definitely not accounting, because if you’re approaching it with generosity, you’re not worried about how many times somebody did X versus Y or whatever. I think that’s where you get into an impossible situation.

Megan: At any given moment, it might actually be unfair from an accounting standpoint. For example, this week, you are doing more childcare of Naomi than I am. That’s just because of the schedule of the kind of meetings I have this week. We’re still trying to figure all of that out with her.

We had a conversation about it on Sunday night about what the week looked like and how that was going to be divided up. The best solution was for you to do this week more of it than me. That’s not always the case. I would say on the whole it balances out, and I think that’s what’s true. Equity is balance, and fairness is accounting.

Joel: That’s a good distinction.

Megan: We try not to do accounting. We try to look for balance overall. If you looked at the big trend line, mostly there is balance between us. We allow for those seasons when one of us has to step up or step in at a higher level. If you were finishing a book project, that might be a time when I would step in more. If somebody is sick, that’s another time. I think you have to create flexibility in the system, and any time you’re talking about fairness, there is a lot of rigidity, and I think equity has space for flexibility.

Joel: I think that’s really true. That separation between accounting and balance is important. Balance definitely has give and take. Accounting just feels rigid.

Megan: Let’s talk about how this is practical for just a second. When you’re thinking about what equity looks like, first of all, you want to consider that you’re different people. You and I are very different. We have different aptitudes, different needs, different energy levels, and different abilities. Right? I’m really good at organization. You’re not really good at organization.

Joel: I don’t even really know what that word means.

Megan: Things like that… If you just try to divide all of the household responsibilities with your family and your home 50-50 down the middle, what you’re going to do is not leverage the unique contribution each of you brings to the table.

Joel: That’s true.

Megan: I think you have to think of how you’re going to divide it up from the perspective of your uniqueness as individuals.

Joel: If you think about it the same way…just to have a thought experiment…the way you would structure a job, you would never just take the group of people you happen to have, divide all of the work evenly, and pass it out. You would look at who is the most skilled to do certain things and assign it that way.

Megan: Absolutely! You have to think about who you are individually. Secondly, you need to think about what season you are in together as a couple and individually. For example, one of you may have just changed jobs or started a new business. You may have just added children to the mix. You may have gotten promoted or someone may be sick or pregnant or traveling or under a big deadline or…

Joel: Launching an entire new business.

Megan: Right! I mean there are so many things that change what balance looks like in the moment, but again, you’re looking for that overall trend line.

Joel: Yep. We’re obviously in the midst of this ourselves with Naomi. We lovingly refer to her as the little domino, because so many things have changed as a result of her coming into our world, and we’re having to renegotiate all kinds of stuff on the fly every day.

Megan: If you’re not following me on Instagram, this is our newly adopted daughter who is now about 7 months old. Our youngest child previously was 9, so we stepped back into parenting babies after a long season of pretty independent children, so our whole world has really turned upside down.

Joel: There are so many factors.

Megan: In good ways and challenging ways.

Larry: The second action you must take in order to create a strong partnership between married professionals is to focus on equity and not fairness. The key here is to avoid keeping score. This is not about accounting; it’s about creating balance between you. Let’s come to our third action, then. Make your own rules. You mean you can do that?

Megan: First of all, I love to make my own rules. Anybody who knows me knows this is one of my favorite things, I think, because very often there is a lot more flexibility in the system overall, whatever that system is, than many of us give it credit for, so I like to come at it from that perspective.

Our expectations around household and family roles are, as we said earlier, largely unstated, unexamined, and unconscious, and they very often come from the example of our parents, from the culture we live in (for example, if you live in the South, your perspective on these things is probably going to be very different than if you live in Manhattan), our religious views, and the views of those around us, not to mention our peers.

If you’re a professional woman and all of your friends are stay-at-home moms, that’s going to give you one perspective. If you’re the husband in a marriage and all of your buddies are married to women who are staying at home, that’s going to make it difficult to figure this out in that you don’t really have good models. You’re going to have to make your own rules and figure this out for yourself. I think that’s important to just keep in mind.

Joel: Well, women have been on the short end of this, I think. As the job market has changed and as women have assumed a much larger and more significant role in the workforce, nothing has changed at home for a lot of people, so there is a baseline problem already in the works there.

Megan: Right! Because traditional household responsibilities very often are still being held by women. It’s still your job to run the family, run the household, run the schedule, and run all of the delegations. Meal planning and all of those things are still held by the wife in a partnership, and that’s difficult.

Larry: That feels intuitively true, but maybe you feel like it’s not so true in your home, and it may be different, but the research is that 50 percent of women and 22 percent of men say they do some type of housework every single day. I just want to point out the gap there. There is a big difference. It’s more than double the number of women who are doing daily chores than men are, so you’re right. Things have not changed all that much at home.

Megan: Also, I want to point out that you said every day, and I would say every hour if you’re home. When I think about what’s happening in our world, I’m doing something related to taking care of our family every hour that I’m not at work probably. I mean, I can’t think of much of an exception to that.

Larry: I won’t dispute it, Megan. I just don’t have any research on that.

Megan: Okay. What this means is it can leave Mom with two full-time jobs. You’re a full-time executive or professional, and you’re a full-time home manager, both of which, by the way, are very important. I should just pause and say in no way are we demeaning the domestic sphere of life. This is critically important.

We talk so much at Michael Hyatt & Company about winning at work and succeeding at life and about prioritizing the things that matter most. One of the biggest parts of that is your family and your home life. You and I are both extremely passionate about that. I think what we’re really saying here is it’s so important that it just can’t be one person’s responsibility if both people are also earning an income outside of the home in a professional level.

Joel: You can’t create a situation where you say it’s important but then you leave it to the last thing that gets done by an overtaxed person.

Larry: Guys, it sounds like you’re saying there is no law anywhere that says men have to mow the lawn and women have to do the dishes.

Joel: Uh… No. There really isn’t. The truth is you can divvy up that work however you decided you wanted to. It’s your game. You can write the rules.

Megan:  For example, one of the things we have done somewhat recently… Our kids have a lot of doctor’s appointments. We have several kids who have some special needs which mean we have a lot of doctor’s appointments or other kinds of therapy appointments, so we have just divided those up.

We used to occasionally go together (not very often), but I would do most of those just kind of by default, and we just decided recently there’s no reason to do that. We just need to divide them up because there are too many of them on the calendar. It doesn’t really make sense for either of us to have to take that much time out of the business. We need to just divide them up, and it has worked out really well.

Joel: The truth is I love taking Naomi to the doctor. I get to show her off.

Megan: It’s fun. Parent-teacher conferences or other school events are another example. You can divide those up. You can divide cooking up. Maybe one person really enjoys cooking. Maybe it’s not the wife. I happen to love cooking, and you love cooking, so we pretty often divide that part up, but maybe one of you really enjoys grocery shopping or other household repair tasks.

In our case, that would be neither one of us. We both hate that. We’re going to talk about that in a minute. There’s really nothing that has to stick to a hard and fast rule. I think the important thing here is that you itemize all of the things that need to be done and decide who’s going to do it, because somebody needs to do it, and if it’s left to a default answer, that’s where you get into trouble.

Joel: Those things can shuffle based on the need of the week and those kinds of things, too. I mean, if your schedule has you tied up till later in the evening for some reason, obviously I’m going to step in more and vice versa.

Larry: The third action is to make your own rules, and this is your game. Set up a game you can win. That brings us to the fourth and final action we’re going to talk about today for creating a strong partnership in two-career families, and that is to offload the tasks you both hate.

Megan: This is kind of our secret sauce. This is the un-discussed, dirty little secret of people who are doing this well. All of the things that need to be done do not have to be done by you.

Joel: Totally!

Megan: Let me say that again. All of the things that need to be done do not need to be done by you, and maybe you can’t hire everything out that you don’t like doing, but presumably if you’re two professionals you could hire some of it out, at least, and I would really look at what the things are that you both hate the most.

For Joel and I, that is painting or handyman work. I’m laughing because I’m thinking of the times… We have painted two houses now that we’ve lived in. At the last one, Joel said, “If we do this again, we’re not going to stay married,” so we decided then and there we were going to hire that out going forward, and we’ve never looked back.

Joel: Yeah. I think I actually said, “If we do this again, I’ll lose my salvation,” but…

Megan: That’s even a level beyond.

Joel: It was the worst experience of my life to that point.

Megan: You can hire a handyman for about $50 to $75 an hour, and you might think, “Gosh, but I’d have spent all Saturday doing those kind of projects.” That’s because you’re terrible at it. A guy or a woman could come in and do it in an hour or two, and you just got your life back.

Joel: This is so basic and so obvious that it’s funny we don’t think about it, but you do this at work all day long. If you have work that you’re terrible at, you find other people to do it. That’s why we have teams. We hire teams for those reasons. That’s why we hire contractors to pick up the slack. That’s why we do all kinds of things to get progress on stuff that we procrastinate and that we’re not very good at.

Why would we not simply do that at home? When you do, what you realize is just what you said, that there is somebody who can do that job three times faster than you can, and you’re going to have to pay them, but the scope of the job is not the amount of time it would take you, because all of the pain and all of the grousing and all of the delaying and all of the Home Depot runs and all of that stuff…

None of that is true for that person who you’re hiring. They’re a professional, so they will come in and do it very quickly and with joy in their hearts. Then, you will have joy in your heart.

Megan: And you’ll stop fighting.

Joel: And you’ll stop fighting.

Larry: Well, I’ll have joy in my heart any time I’m not smashing my thumb with a hammer, so it’s well worth the investment for me. We should point out that we covered this episode (really, Megan did) with Michael in Episode 91. We covered this topic in an episode called How to Create More Margin in Your Personal Life, so be sure to check that out.

Well, today we’ve learned that professionals who are married to each other can have a strong and successful partnership by taking four actions together. Talk about it, focus on equity not fairness, make your own rules, and offload the tasks you both hate, and when you do, you’re going to feel a lot less stressed when you walk into the door of your own home. Any final thoughts for our listeners today?

Joel: You know, I just keep coming back to that thought about the masters and the disasters. If you approach your marriage with kindness and generosity as the primary modes with which you’re interacting with your spouse, I don’t see how you’re ever really going to fail.

I think if both parties do that and they’re assuming that’s true about each other, then you can negotiate all kinds of things, and nothing is really all that risky, and nothing is really all that fraught, and nothing is really all that problematic. If you just keep that frame of mind, you can kind of navigate through just about anything.

Megan: I love that. All of this conversation just brings me back to the thing I often talk about, which is that you can define success on your own terms. We are passionate here at Michael Hyatt & Company about helping you, our listeners, to win at work and succeed at life. That’s our mission, and I think you can do that by defining success on your own terms and negotiating these areas of your life that are seemingly mundane but incredibly important. If you’ll do that, the results can be incredible.

Joel: That’s right.

Larry: Well, Megan and Joel, thank you both for really practical insights and some great help for a lot of working spouses.

Megan: Thanks, Larry!

Joel: Thanks, Larry!

Megan: Thank you all for joining us today. We’ll see you right here next week. Until then, lead to win.

Michael: On Lead to Win, we talk a lot about productivity and making sure as leaders we are focused on what really matters, but you can’t do that if you’re trying to do everything yourself (everything needed to run a business on your own). Well, our friends at BELAY have been helping leaders like you and me for 10 years.

BELAY can simplify your life with an assistant. They match busy leaders like you with exceptional assistants and bookkeepers. They do that by having a team searching the US for extraordinary people who have the experience you need. For our podcast listeners, BELAY is offering their free download of 25 Things You Can Delegate to an Assistant Today. Just text LEADTOWIN (all one word) to 31996. Again, text LEADTOWIN (all one word) to 31996.