Why Aligning Your Vision is Vital When Working With Your Spouse

The following is adapted from The Survival Guide to Working with Your Spouse by Brad Casebier.

How can you reach your destination when you are rowing in different directions?

Some of our greatest time losses, heartaches, and frustrations have been due to having a dissimilar vision. These dissimilarities can be big and obvious or nearly invisible. If my wife, Sarah, wanted to create and own a pet store, and I wanted to create and own a sporting-goods store, this would be an easy conversation to sort out. Who is right? Who wins? Ah, that is the challenge, right?

The sneaky, insidious differences are the tiny ones. Let’s say we both want to build a sporting-goods store. We each create a mental picture of what that looks like. No one can see my picture but me. No one can see Sarah’s picture but Sarah. We can talk about it with each other, but we can never truly see, feel, or understand the other’s vision. When decisions are being made, one person starts to feel violated, and that’s when we begin to understand we might have different outcomes in mind. “Wait a minute!” we might think. “That was not how it was supposed to be!” This is not a conversation about who is right or wrong. The feeling of violation occurs simply because something is happening that doesn’t line up with the way it looks in our head. Often when we talk it through, we find that it wasn’t an important detail, and we adapt our vision. There are some changes that challenge our deepest-held beliefs about what the company is supposed to become.

One person may see themselves as a mentor to the staff and look forward to being a leader in young people’s lives. Another may want to become the CEO of a national franchise. Yet another might be thinking this is a four- to five-year “build it and sell it” vision. These differences will lead to massively different decision-making criteria.

Here is where it gets really tricky. Most of us do not fully understand our own vision in its entirety. We hold so much of our visions of the future in the unconscious mind. We don’t naturally itemize all of the small details. Much of what we envision is tied up in emotions, models we have experienced in the past, and half-thoughts. Most often, it isn’t until we feel violated in some way that we begin to explore where that pain came from, and what it was that we were expecting. The farther down the trail we go, the more clarity we have about where we are going.

Your vision is yours alone. It represents a deep well of desires, hopes, feelings, meanings, and outcomes that you likely haven’t fully uncovered, much less expressed to your partner. You may think you have, but the words you used to describe your vision only conveyed a percentage of what it contains. Has this ever happened on a vacation or romantic getaway? How often did it turn out you had different ideas of what it was going to be, and it all ended in frustration? Your business is more than a ten-year commitment with dissimilar outcomes, hopes, expectations, and dreams. Your kids are there, and you have employees on this “vacation,” too. No pressure, but it’s going to get messy, and every aspect of your life is rolled into this venture. Getting clarity on the vision is the first key to success.

As amazing as our process is for creating and aligning your visions, you will not capture all of your hidden expectations. I have some great news for you! You are hardwired with a radar that tells you when you need to uncover hidden expectations. It is called pain. This may sound unpleasant, but pain does not necessarily mean “bad.” Still, if you are going to run a business with your spouse, buckle up. There will be some pain on this journey. A great failure of my early thinking was believing that, if we were in pain, that meant that we or I had failed in some way. I am so over that. Pain is part of the process, simply an indicator of the need for growth. Pain is the gift that indicates something needs to be investigated.

It’s OK to feel pain — in yourself and in your relationship. It is also OK for your partner to feel pain. I’ll take that even one step farther: you both are feeling pain all the time. If you are not expressing pain points with each other, you are on a dangerous path. Suppression leads to explosions. Suppression leads to failed relationships and businesses. The best marriages and partnerships are ones that have created a safe place and enough trust to be able to talk through things that cause pain.

Here is the magic: when you stop fearing pain, you can remain calm and simply investigate what the pain is trying to tell you.

As a healthy adult, you have dealt with some pain in your life. In doing so, you have worked out some ways of dealing with it. You don’t have a written process, but you definitely have a hardwired, subconsciously driven system in place. Let’s say, for instance, you are going on a walk, and you start to have some pain in your right foot. What do you do?

First, you consider the options. You do this by running through a series of inquiries:

1. Perhaps this will go away if I keep going, and it is simply a small cramp or stretching pain.
2. What could the cause be? Is it something that made its way into my shoe (external), the shoe itself (a device or an employee), the way I am walking (process, technique), or is something wrong with my foot (me, or the business itself)?
3. If I keep going, will this cause damage that I will have to needlessly recover from later?
4. At some point, we decide it is time to stop, fidget with the shoe, or possibly sit down, take the shoe off, take the sock off, and really get a clear idea of what is going on. If the problem is still concerning, and we cannot figure it out, we have to get professional help and have someone else look at it, so we go to the doctor.
5. We then follow a recovery plan.

Any one of the steps above may find and alleviate the issue, but all along the way, pain was the gift to tell you to look. If you didn’t have the pain, then you may have walked for miles with a pebble in your shoe and developed a hole that would lead to really serious problems. Keep in mind that unless the pain becomes so severe that you must stop, you would just keep moving forward while you investigate. We are walking somewhere, right? Our desire is to keep moving toward the objective.

If you have been around children, it is funny to see how they deal with pain:

• PANIC! “I don’t like this! This shouldn’t feel this way!”
• Expand the problem: no investigation; only focus on the pain point. They give their pain massive meaning. “This the end; even my death is near.”
• Blame: “You need to fix this for me. My problem is your problem. Don’t you love me?”
• There is no world outside this pain.
• Cry, shout, and fuss until someone else makes it go away.

Sadly, this ineffective pain-management system is not limited to children. I am sure as you read that, you had some immediate examples come to mind of adults, your partner, and even yourself stuck in this model. Until the parent stops resolving the child’s issues, they will continue to reach out for the adult to resolve the pain. We are pretty smart about experiencing physical pain and finding the cause and solution — but a whole lot more likely to revert to our childhood way of resolving pain.

We are all addicted to a drug that immediately dissolves our pain. It works so well that we may use it daily and enable others to use it even more. It feels so good, but it kills our ability to grow. What stops our ability to face the discomfort in a mature, investigative way? It is the easy shortcut of becoming the victim and turning to blame. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received is from my friend Sam Falsafi. He said, “Brother, whatever you are experiencing with your wife right now, you created it.” Turns out he was right. When I investigate my part in creating responses in people around me, instead of being a victim, I find that I created the event that is now causing me pain. Be careful of sharing your sad victim story with your friends.

Think back on the last time you shared a story of how your partner was being difficult. How did your friends help you? Did they supply you with some stories that helped you feel you were not to blame, or did they challenge you to look where you have accountability? Mostly I find we have natural tendencies to supply our friend with “victim” stories if they don’t already have their own.

Your ability to lean into the discomfort of 100 percent personal accountability and turn those “victim” perspectives into growth paths for yourself will determine your success in business and your relationships.

Vision Questions

Imagine two people in the same boat, rowing with two different destinations in mind. It is possible that, early on, the cooperative energy moves both roughly toward their basic, final outcome. But the further the journey progresses, the more conflicting the efforts become. The forces going in different directions will eventually stop all forward motion. Somewhere in the process, we recognize that we are not in alignment, conflict occurs, and we reevaluate our direction. Plan on having these direction reassessment conversations regularly. As stated earlier, you only think you know what you want. Your unconscious mind is at work with its own agenda, which reveals itself over time. You are hearing your partner’s vision through your filters (world views, rules, and preferences).

There are a few outcomes to this conflict. If you are in conflict, congratulations! That is normal. You are OK. Give yourself some grace to learn as you go, and give your partner room to learn more about themselves as they go, too. Sure, it would be nice if we never laid out an action plan and nothing ever changed, but that is not the planet we live in. I believe it is imperative to give ourselves and each other permission to completely change our mind, back out, or step up as the business moves forward. This is the love of my life we are talking about here, not some stranger earning $60,000 per year for a service. I want her to have the most fulfilling life experience possible. To me, that means that I allow her to experience life in whatever setting she feels she needs to be OK. That requires a large amount of flexibility from me. It has certainly caused me a whole lot of pain, but that pain became the gift. Without these gifts, I would have not explored the depths of my soul to uncover the triggers that were all insecurities in myself.

For more advice on working with your spouse, you can find The Survival Guide to Working with Your Spouse on Amazon.

Brad Casebier was a typical struggling small business owner who discovered that partnering with his wife gave them both a superpower to grow something truly remarkable together. Like all married business partners, he and his wife, Sarah, quickly discovered that working together while maintaining a fulfilling relationship was going to require some changes.

Brad and Sarah’s humble beginnings and their belief that anything is possible are proof that the American dream still exists. The Survival Guide to Working with Your Spouse shares the changes that worked for them so that you, too, can build an amazing future.