If you and your partner aren’t rowing in the same direction, you’re just going to spin in circles (and probably kill each other).
Ok, I’ll stop with the rowing analogies here soon, but it pertains quite well to the topic.
I work with a lot of spouses in my business coaching, and I work with a lot of people who seem to have a spouse that acts more like an anchor than a partner.
It’s honestly one of the biggest hurdles I see to someone’s success in almost any venture.
With an unsupportive partner, I can almost guarantee that you will fail.
On the contrary, if you have a supportive partner who acts like a teammate, you’ll both get where you want to go twice as fast.
Here’s how:
- Get on the same page, even if your stories tell a slightly different tale. As I mentioned a few weeks ago about goal setting, we like to extend our view out to many decades from now and work backwards. To recap, we do last ten years of life, 10 years from now, 3-5 years from now, then 1 year from now. We do this individually and then we do this as a team.
Then we come back together, compare notes and separate things out for what we need to work towards as a family and what we both want to chase as individuals.
Thankfully for us, we’re headed in the same general direction, and for the things that differ, we can both achieve what we’re after without totally diverging from the united path.
We’ve done this on vision boards (in fact that’s how we ended up in Sandpoint, owning a gym), we’ve done this on whiteboards, and now we just do this with a shared google doc.
- Once we have the big pictures stuff ironed out and clear, we come together to outline the specifics of the next year and upcoming 90 day focuses. We talk about goals, habits, areas of intention, finances, trips, and potential obstacles. Then we talk about how each person plays a part on the team. Sometimes it’s holding the other accountable, sometimes it’s what that person’s business is responsible for, and sometimes it’s giving the other person grace for the thing that they want to do.
To give it some structure, we use 6 “F”s. Freedom, finances, family, faith, fitness and future. Those are a little gray, so sometimes things won’t fit into a neat little category, but we’ve found it to be pretty sufficient.
- Then, and this is where the magic happens, we revisit this list every single week. Occasionally we miss a week, but it’s rare. We’re so dedicated to this process because we’ve seen what happens when we take months off, and we’ve seen what happens when we’re diligent. It is night and day difference. Like monumental in trajectory type different.
We go line by line by line and talk about our combined goals, our individual goals and what happened that week. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes we feel like we really moved the needle, or at least checked the box. Other times it is horrendous. Most of the time it falls somewhere in the middle.
But the best part about it is that we’re moving forward together and each helping the other one move forward on their own. Sometimes that’s a tough conversation. If one’s goal is working out 5 days a week, and they haven’t for a few weeks in a row, despite their stated intents, it can be a little awkward, but if you’re successful as partners, you’ll find a way to encourage and help without it getting too bad, and the partner that needs the help will be thankful for it in the long run.
That’s it! So now you just need to go get together with your partner and magnify your efforts to massively impact your trajectory.
