How to Work With Your Spouse

Happy Hour With The Pasternacks

Grab a BIG glass of wine 🍷 as we are talking about a TOUGH topic, How To Work With Your Spouse. 

Today’s topic, working with your spouse, has taken us YEARS to perfect( and still perfecting). In no way do we have it completely figured out, but we have learned lots of valuable lessons throughout our 10 years of working together.

Working with your spouse is interconnected with so many aspects of your life. It may look SOOO hard and you may be thinking OH NEVER EVER could I work with my spouse( that was us haha!).  The truth is that it can be done and you need systems in place to help your working relationship become healthy and productive.  

Tip #1 Over-Communicate

Okay,  we have all heard that communication is so important in a marriage. So if it is ESSENTIAL in your marriage, it is even MORE important in your working relationship. We have to be able to communicate to each other about our business goals, feelings, and home-work balance. The home-work balance is such a huge stressor in your working relationship. Communicating with your spouse on daily tasks helps TONS in your day to day workflow. You BOTH have different likes and dislikes and you need to communicate these, and support those needs. When you work with your spouse, it is very difficult to grow and scale businesses if your personal life is chaotic/toxic. You are a team and success in your working relationship starts at a personal level. We have found that our BIGGEST successes in our business have been when we are aligned on a personal level. 

When we started the idea of working together, we would just look at other couples and be envious of their lives. We would think OHHHH it looks so magical and so easy, when in reality these couples( like chip and joanna), have worked their butt off to get to where they currently are in their business lives. 

Fighting through hard issues to get your goals back aligned. We have such astigmatism around fighting, but in reality this is showing each other your desires and wants. You are HUMAN you are each experiencing different emotions and struggles. Fighting through your issues helps each other to clearly see the goals and how you can support each other.

Tip #2 Getting Aligned on Your Calendar

We both have always loved calendars, but have lacked the alignment. Goals and tasks can not be accomplished well, if there is not a plan. If you both have plans but are planning them separate from each other, then there is no cohesion.  When we were unaligned our life was CHAOTIC, we both in straight survival mode. Trying to plan our future could not happen when we didn’t even know what was happening in the next hour. We can not stress enough the importance of aligning your calendars. Communicate your schedules/tasks, growth CANNOT happen if you are not on the same page. 

Planning your calendar to eliminate as much stress in the future allows you to better create a workflow that works for you and your family. Once again, this has taken us YEARS to perfect and know that this is not an overnight process. Start with something simple such as planning out your next month. For our day to day lives, we use google calendar or i-calendar so that we can both see LIVE available time slots. This allows us to see conflicts in real time, and has saved us TONS of stress. We love using these calendars and highly recommend them for working together. 

Tip #3 Set Roles and Responsibilities

You shouldn’t assume things about your partner. When this happens, responsibilities in both your personal and working relationship fall through the cracks. It is so important to have conversations about the roles and responsibilities that you each are going to have in your business and home life.  We have created an organizational chart that clearly outlines the groundwork for “who is responsible for what”. Not only doing this in your business, but also for your family life. This helps to alleviate stress, burn out and resentment towards your spouse. 

Listen to each other and learn what your partner likes and dislikes. Doing this in your personal life, transfers over to your working life. Give each other titles, so that the responsibilities are clear, and these titles should play into each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The biggest take away that we have learned from this is that setting roles and responsibilities allows you to ask for help when needed. This has been HUGE in our personal life and we can’t emphasize it enough. 

The reality is that working together takes a lot of work, and we went through a lot of learning/growth to get to the healthy working relationship that we now have. Now we couldn’t imagine NOT working together. We hope that this peek into our working relationship helps you to create systems and plans that will strengthen both your personal and working relationship!

Cheers,

Mark and Nicole

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