Are you tired of feeling torn between growing your business and being present for your family? Do you worry that pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams means sacrificing what matters most?
In this powerful episode, hosts Kevin and Bekah Tinter, successful entrepreneurs and parents of four, reveal their top 3 strategies for achieving true work-life harmony.
With practical tips and hard-won wisdom from building a 7-figure business while keeping family first, they'll show you how to escape the hustle and grind and design a business that supports your ideal lifestyle.
You'll discover:
If you've ever felt like you're choosing between your business and your family, this episode is a must-listen. You'll walk away with a proven roadmap for growing a successful business without compromising your values or your relationships.
Ready to experience the freedom of building a business that enhances your life? Tune in now and discover the work-life balance secrets that have transformed Kevin and Bekah’s family and business.
Subscribe and tell a friend!
Get my new book "The Seven Disciplines of Uncommon Freedom" on Amazon!
Visit bekandkev.com today to sign up for our email newsletter.
Access our Free health assessment HERE
Are you tired of feeling torn between growing your business and being present for your family? Do you worry that pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams means sacrificing what matters most?
In this powerful episode, hosts Kevin and Bekah Tinter, successful entrepreneurs and parents of four, reveal their top 3 strategies for achieving true work-life harmony.
With practical tips and hard-won wisdom from building a 7-figure business while keeping family first, they'll show you how to escape the hustle and grind and design a business that supports your ideal lifestyle.
You'll discover:
If you've ever felt like you're choosing between your business and your family, this episode is a must-listen. You'll walk away with a proven roadmap for growing a successful business without compromising your values or your relationships.
Ready to experience the freedom of building a business that enhances your life? Tune in now and discover the work-life balance secrets that have transformed Kevin and Bekah’s family and business.
Subscribe and tell a friend!
Get my new book "The Seven Disciplines of Uncommon Freedom" on Amazon!
Visit bekandkev.com today to sign up for our email newsletter.
Access our Free health assessment HERE
Balance is about your boundaries.
Speaker 2:The more successful you become, more demand will be put on your time and the more important it will be for you to be selective. Say yes only or primarily to the things that only you can do. Welcome to the Uncommon Freedom Show. I'm Kevin Tinter.
Speaker 1:And I'm Becca Tinter. Together, we've been so blessed to build a seven-figure business that serves tens of thousands of people while also serving our family.
Speaker 2:And that's one of our biggest goals for this podcast to help faith and family-first entrepreneurs build companies that serve a lifestyle of freedom. Here's the all-too-common story for entrepreneur couples and families Mom or dad start a business with a great opportunity, product or service. They opt out of the nine to five lifestyle and fake promise of safety and security because ultimately they want freedom?
Speaker 1:Yes, just like we did. Only sometimes that vision of financial or time freedom feels more like wishful thinking. Juggling growth, doing the work, hiring and everything in between can spread us thin, and for couples running a business or even multiple businesses together, it can quickly feel like your companies actually run you.
Speaker 2:So today we are sharing three work-life balance secrets for family. First entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:So excited about this topic, me too, me too. We, like, have so many notes and it was hard to decide what to share, but we are really, really excited about this topic.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and this is our 69th podcast episode. Yes, it is Very special for married couples who enjoy each other right.
Speaker 1:All right, absolutely PG. Come on, don't blush my love.
Speaker 2:All right. Hey, we're really excited. This is an awesome topic. We have learned a ton about this over the last 13 years. You've been an entrepreneur as far as like a stay-at-home network marketing style business for gosh about 20 years.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And then kind of that was a very side hustle business. Yes, I did not have that entrepreneurial bug because I wanted to be in the military, I wanted to be in law enforcement and those are employee type careers and, although I enjoyed the benefits of a steady paycheck and all the benefits that come with it, were, you know, theoretical benefits, insurance, retirement, things like that there's a big ball and chain that comes with those types of jobs and we embarked on our entrepreneurial journey as a couple about 13 years ago and I just want to give a shout out on the front end of this. We have been blessed to have some incredible mentors along the way. Our former pastor, jared Roth, really took me under his wing when I was just a few months into this. We were experiencing unbelievable growth, god's blessing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And starting to feel some of the tension of wait a minute, I went into this because I wanted the freedom of being my own boss but starting to feel the tension of there's never quitting time. You have to set the quitting time and there's all these exciting but sometimes overwhelming demands to be a part of this. Because what we've learned and this is where kind of the concept of rowing upstream is is when you stop rowing upstream, eventually you start going downstream and it takes a lot of discipline and it takes boundaries to figure out. Okay, I can't take a break from rowing, how long can that be and when can I do that?
Speaker 1:And it really depends on your personality styles.
Speaker 1:We can do anything together or anything, uh, any type of adventure, because I'm a recovering people pleaser and so I have a very difficult time saying no to things. And as we get through more of these podcasts, we'll probably talk about our working dynamics and relationship, and it's definitely been both a blessing and a challenge for us to work together. Personality style, because I like to show up to things, I like to be responsible to things, and so I can overcommit or commit to things I don't really want to do. I don't know if anyone else is out there, but just because I want to be responsible and a contributor, and so it's been an interesting journey to walk that out together and also to grow individually in this.
Speaker 1:So, okay, our first thing that we wanted to cover is balance is about your boundaries, and I don't know what kind of feelings you get when you hear the word boundaries. For some people they feel great about it, other people maybe it gives you a little bit of anxiety. But you know, there's always that example of kids on a playground where they need a fence. They actually feel more safe and secure when there's a fence that they can go up to than just having a wide open field, and so boundaries are a good thing, and some of our favorite books even come in that boundaries series, like Boundaries for Leaders, written by Henry Cloud. But we wanted to talk about how to set and hold boundaries as one of the first things that we were going to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, and real quick. A lot of times people talk about work-life balance, and I think it's important to address this right out of the gate. Is that work-life balance assumes that maybe that work is a bad thing and that life is a good thing? You know everything else.
Speaker 1:And also that everything gets the same equal slice of the pie.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:The way I say it is like you're never going to have one hour that you go to work, one hour with your family, one hour on your marriage and then one hour for personal. You know, personal time At least that's not common. It would be a very rare occurrence for that to happen. So when we say balance, everyone thinks like, okay, if I do it equally on each side, everything's going to work out fine what we've learned is to live an integrated life right.
Speaker 2:Where you know. There's the saying if you love what you do, you'll never work another day in your life. That's honestly. That's BS, um, because we love what we do. But there are still some aspects of what we do that get tedious and it isn't true. But ultimately, when you love what you do, when you love the business that you're in and the service you provide, the product you sell, whatever it is, it can be so awesome and so fulfilling that you love it and what you work towards is this integrated life where you haven't lost focus of your priorities, of your family, of maybe serving in your community, being a part of your church and things like that, and you're able to integrate the business aspect into that. But it's not necessarily always having to separate. Okay, I'm turning my phone off, I'm done for the day. There's some wisdom in that. So balance boundaries.
Speaker 1:We call it more of a counterbalance life which we're going to talk about a little bit. What you don't want is to build something that then your family resents, and that can happen often when you fall in love with whatever your adventure is and the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Then the family can also get left behind.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when it comes to setting and holding boundaries, one of the most important things that we discussed is that it's important to know your priorities. Most people are familiar with the analogy of rocks, pebbles and sand with the analogy of rocks, pebbles and sand, and so your ultimate priorities need to be rocks. You have to identify those and you have to decide what you want to be known for. For us, some of the things are having a bulletproof marriage, raising kids who feel cherished and empowered to lead themselves. We talk about wanting to raise responsible adults that are generous and impact makers, versus raising happy kids, but those priorities are really important.
Speaker 1:They are, because once you know those, everything, every other decision you make should be connected to that.
Speaker 1:Yes and I think the dissonance happens when you either forget those things, or maybe you've never made those decisions, or you have not made them together with your partner and your spouse, and so maybe one person's going one direction and one person's going a different direction. So it's really important to know the rocks in your schedule, because most people fill in the sand first. That's the meaningless things like scrolling on social and TV time and just the wasted time things. And the pebbles can even be things that just get put into our calendar, into our jar, but they're not the most important things, and so by the time we get around to the rocks, often we find there's not enough room for them. Yeah, and then was it the Eisenhower?
Speaker 2:matrix. Is that the quadrant that, if you look it up, talks about? There's the important in the urgent and it's very easy to get sucked into unimportant urgent tasks and activities that will most people in America probably in, or Western culture probably spend most of their time on those unimportant urgent things that, honestly, if they never got done it would have almost no impact on your life. Yet that's what sucks our time. Even you know things like notifications and answering your phone. Every time you know it rings, it's like where was it? What was happening? I was doing something, talking to one of my kids and he saw a phone phone call coming in on my phone. He's like Dad so-and-so is calling. I'm like, okay, I don't care, like I'm doing something else, playing a game or something like that. That is a perfect example of something that's unimportant and urgent but just learning to ignore it. So let's talk about how do we hold each other accountable for boundaries?
Speaker 1:I boss you around Just kidding. What would be ideal and what we work in? A relationship where you live and work and sleep together and want to have both intimacy and the business happening at the same time. So that permission is really important. Communication is so important.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, going back to 13 years ago, this was your business right. Um, you know our primary source of income was your business. I had no interest, you were out there. You know your goal is to make a thousand bucks a month, if possible.
Speaker 1:Our primary source of income was your work. Actually, yes, just to clarify, we weren't living on a thousand dollars. It is now switched.
Speaker 2:I'm no longer a police officer, so the business you started is now our primary source of income. But you were, it was your business. When you started, I had no interest and it took some communication. You started telling me. You know, some of the tension initially was I would come home from work, you needed me to take over the kids. It felt like you were on the phone all the time. But once we learned how to communicate a little bit and you say, hey, if you could help me out with this. This is what we're working towards.
Speaker 2:You had some goals that you had written down. You brought me into that Um. You said, hey, um, what are some things that you would like to do? You know my goal is to make X amount of money. If we accomplish this or we go beyond it. What are some things that you would like to do with this? And that was really important, um, to help keep me from feeling resentful about because initially I do remember thinking, oh my gosh, she's always on the phone. Um, but it was a small sacrifice. It was a worthwhile sacrifice to get to where we, you know. We got to the point where I was able to exit law enforcement because of that pursuit of freedom.
Speaker 1:And you also came alongside me and I see, I see a lot of misses in this department where you did not expect me to do it all, because if you had said, well, you can build a side business, if you can keep up with dishes, keep up with kids, no, I'm not going to help you, you need to stay in your lane we would never have gotten anywhere.
Speaker 1:We never really had a relationship where we treat each other that way, but I see it in couples all the time where there's an expectation that, like I'm not going to help you and I do expect you to get it all done. So one you came in and you contributed, but you also gave me options where we could work towards different delegation tools, which meant childcare. So you know, we found a way to delegate some childcare during the day so I would have some time to get my work done during the daytime. We built up to where we could afford a housekeeper Well, I wouldn't call it a housekeeper, someone who would clean our house for two hours once a month to clean the toilets and that just created some of that freedom as well, and so I feel like we had. We built our partnership pretty quickly, which allowed us to go faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. And how do we know which boundaries to set?
Speaker 1:we schedule everything, almost almost, almost everything, so if you're not working with an online shareable calendar, I highly, highly encourage you to do this. Um, we've always said, you know, we love talking to each other, we love engaging in conversation, but we would rather it be meaningful conversation than approving and and giving thumbs up to commitments that we each want to make throughout the week, and so, by having a shareable calendar, we can invite each other. We can also see open spaces, and we've also just given each other specific days that we're each working.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really works really well for us.
Speaker 2:So I think it's important to identify and also just go back to. We have our yearly reflection worksheet, which is an awesome resource available on our website. It's something that we compiled after using many different resources. We kind of say okay, how do we create a single document that works really well to help us plan out the year? It helps us identify our priorities in the key areas of life, and then we identify okay, there's some things that you need to do daily, others weekly, others monthly, others quarterly and others annually. And when you break it down like that and you create your boundaries within that structure, it's very helpful.
Speaker 2:So, as an example, we've talked about this before, but we've identified that one of the commitments we make is doing three trips per year as a family. We kind of have a rhythm now where we go on a ski trip in spring break. On spring break we go to the Bahamas. In October our kids have fall break. It's the best thing in the world.
Speaker 1:We love that we talk about that trip.
Speaker 2:All year long. We talk about the last one, we look forward to the next one and those. That rhythm has been awesome. And then there's kind of a third trip per year that we don't always know what that's going to be, but we will get it scheduled for sure and that goes in as a rock. And the reality is like we have a annual leadership meeting with our company and there was the possibility that it's normal schedule was going to conflict with our Bahamas trip. Our Bahamas trip is scheduled, my brother goes with us. It was. We weren't going to conflict with our Bahamas trip. Our Bahamas trip is scheduled, my brother goes with us. It. We weren't going to go on that leadership trip if it conflicted with this rock. Now that leadership trip is also a rock in our schedule because normally it's the same uh time of the year and so we put that in on the front end. Um, but if it changes the you, the family trip is a rock, we're not going to adjust it.
Speaker 1:And so the other non-negotiables we have would be like birthdays, I mean holidays. These are obvious things to most families, but for some people they just haven't made them a priority, so they sneak up on you Anniversaries, and so just having those non-negotiables decided ahead of time is really important. Now, one of our other non-negotiables is dating our kids. We've talked about this in past podcasts. We call it a debt, a deep emotional bonding time, and we do that monthly with each of our kids, and quarterly we take our kids out together. So for a double debt.
Speaker 1:But the way we describe something like that is it is a flexible but not optional rock on our calendar, so it happens every month. We kind of schedule it in when we think it's going to work, but as life unfolds, a lot of times we have to move it around. As soon as we have an opening, though, we take advantage of that and we make sure to prioritize it so that we don't have to get backed up in that area or skip it. So it always is going to happen, and that is something that's important to us from a relationship building standpoint with our kids.
Speaker 2:Real quick. But you know, the other thing about birthdays, anniversaries, things like that is it's different for everybody. Right, we have made a commitment or maybe it's a general rule of thumb that we don't travel over our kids' birthdays. This year we're about to travel over our kids' birthdays.
Speaker 2:This year we're about to travel over our son's 17th birthday. Now, the truth is, if it was his 18th birthday, we probably would either be bringing him with us or we would be skipping the trip Right. But this particular son isn't like birthdays, aren't that big of a deal to him. We're celebrating before we go on the trip and it's just not that big of a deal. We have other kids where being gone on their birthday would be a big deal. But you have to figure out things like that, whether it's a holiday, it's an anniversary or a birthday, and then you put it in your calendar and then you just know. I say no to things, whether it's a speaking engagement or something else.
Speaker 1:Hopefully you know you're on family's birthdays and you don't need them on the calendar, but it is good to decide when you're celebrating them.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:Now do we want to talk about past years, when I was a Pamper Chef consultant and I scheduled parties on your birthday, yes, yeah. It's like I was so desperate for shows that if one came along and it happened to fall on January 15th, I would just be like, well, we'll celebrate before or after. That was not a good moment for our marriage.
Speaker 2:It doesn't speak my love language. No, it didn't.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is you don't like guests but you do like to.
Speaker 2:I guess maybe quality time I need to redo the five love language test to figure out what my love language is.
Speaker 1:That was a learning lesson, as I did that a couple times in a row and you were not happy. Where I was like is on the 24th. If we celebrate on the 23rd, no big deal, but I think the older I get, the the less I would enjoy more flexible are you on no? The less flexible, the more I would like to celebrate on my actual day.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting okay, maybe it's because as our kids get older, the they take up so much more time. Yeah, that we're like.
Speaker 1:Okay, mother's day and my birthday are the two days per year days that I, that I actually feel like people are thinking about me and raise your hand if you're a mom or a dad, and on mother's day or father's day, you just want to go be by yourself. Yes, everyone's mom and husband.
Speaker 2:Brunch together and then the rest of the day by yourself, right?
Speaker 1:Exactly. We know our, our ways to refuel ourselves. Yes exactly Okay, we know our ways to refuel ourselves. Yes, exactly Okay. So we're still on the first thing, so we want to keep going here, real quick. The next thing we want to talk about is how to know, did I skip over which one?
Speaker 2:Well, we talked about, decide how much you can participate. So when it comes to business, depending on what business or, you know, job you have, is decide how much you can participate. So for us there was a season where, you know, we were in massive growth. We were part of, you know, we were really one of just a couple of younger family teams that were growing like crazy. We were being asked to speak on lots of calls to speak at events. Our company was expanding into some white space areas.
Speaker 2:So there was all these traveling opportunities and they weren't necessarily high leverage for us and yet there was kind of this expectation and many times it's just assumed um of us being everywhere. And so, you know, jared uh kind of come up with a plan where we looked at our calendar. We said what can we afford to do? How many times can we afford to travel? We know that there's an annual summer event. There was this leap fall leadership event that we're a part of Um.
Speaker 2:In the past there was also a spring, uh like semi leadership event and so we wanted to be a part of those. We could commit to those and I think we decided that we had capacity to do maybe one other event and then we would go to our leadership team, mentorship team and say, hey, we're honored, we want to be a part of this, but our family is a priority as well. We're busy with kids. You know we were dealing with programs and things like that, just learning more about some of the challenges some of our kids had. That created extra demand on us and so, instead of coming across like we couldn't, we weren't cooperative, weren't supportive, didn't want to participate- this helped the people.
Speaker 1:Pleasing side of me.
Speaker 2:Yes, we were able to be proactive and say, hey, we have the capacity. We looked at our calendar. We have the capacity to participate in four events. We think that these three are a rock. We've already got them scheduled. Would you agree with those priorities? Yes, so we have the capacity to help out with one other thing, and that just it, just and also please ask this again. Yes.
Speaker 1:So what it kept me from doing is feeling like if I said no once or twice that. I would stop being asked to do some of the things I felt called to do, but the season wasn't right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it gave me time for them to just give me a little space to get through early parenting years and some of the transitions with your job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even like right now, with a church finally being plugged into a church where we consider it our church home. Um, I'm on the worship team, but I let them know. Like I mean, there's not a lot of people on the team. I want to serve, but I only have the capacity right now to serve once a month and you know, being upfront with that, if it ends up things change and I can participate more, that's great. But I think a lot of people end up serving out of guilt and they just don't know how to say no, and we're going to talk about that.
Speaker 1:But as much as you can set up those parameters, so there's a couple of sayings that are out there, you know, among personal development, you know gurus and such that are have been so helpful for us.
Speaker 1:One is every yes has to be defended by a thousand no's. And that mindset means that I'm, if I say yes quickly, if I say yes frivolously, I'm likely going to regret it because of all the things I will not be able to do with that same time or those same finances or that same capacity. And so that's from the one thing I think by Gary Keller and James Capeson. And so again, just that mantra every time I say yes, it has to be defended by quote unquote a thousand no's. And the other thing that again I think came from Jared was capability is not the same as capacity, because so many times we say I'm capable of doing this, so I should do it, instead of saying I am capable of this but I don't have the capacity to do it right now. And when you separate those two things out, you can separate out your identity attached to it and you can make a wiser decision with what you say yes or no to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one other thing for people to keep in mind is, the more successful you become, the demands, more demands will be put on your time, and the more important will be for you to be selective. Say yes to the only, say yes only or primarily to the things that only you can do. And we we were experiencing this, as you know. We were rising to the top ranks of our company, the more successful we wanted. It was like hey, can you speak on this Zoom? Can you speak on this Zoom? Can you speak on this Zoom? And what we learned is to primarily invest our time in the area where we had the most influence. So it might sound selfish, but we would primarily invest our time with the team that we had influence over. You go and start taking time away from your family and your business to pour into people. Maybe even you know you're speaking at a completely different industry event. Yeah, it could be fun, you might get paid for it, but that's not growing your primary business, and so just learning to identify that is really important.
Speaker 1:And use caution. It doesn't mean you never say yes to those things, but some people say yes to those things all the time and then they end up losing time with family and they end up losing their you know the ability to influence the things that make them the most money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and understanding impact right. So sometimes you're going to decide, okay, if I speak to a smaller group or smaller crowd or something like that, where's the leverage, where's the impact that I can have? Yeah, and that's something that we have learned. We want to focus our time on things that have bigger impact, more leverage.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we are working through the three work-life balance secrets. We did number one, which is it's all about your boundaries. So secret number two is prove your priorities with action. Don't tell me what you're going to do. Show me what you're going to do.
Speaker 2:Show me the money.
Speaker 1:Show me the money.
Speaker 2:Yep. So if you say your priorities are family time, time with God, exercise, your calendar or an audit of how you actually spend your time will actually show whether or not that's true.
Speaker 1:Really. Your calendar and your bank account will tell you what you value.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so many people say they can't afford to tithe. Then you do an audit of their finances and you realize they're spending money on Netflix, hulu, you know, all these subscription services, cigarettes, you know, or you know just all kinds of things that are completely unnecessary.
Speaker 1:I don't have time to work out, but then you again take an audit of you know where they're spending a good portion of their day and it's just amazing.
Speaker 1:So, again, when we want to say something as a priority, then we actually need to prove that out. To say something as a priority, then we actually need to prove that out. If someone were to take a look behind the scenes, peek back the curtain, they would say, yeah, that person values health. Yes, that person values their faith. Yes, that person is growing and building a business. I see them working behind the scenes. So don't tell me, show me.
Speaker 2:How do we reset priorities?
Speaker 1:You know, we recognize seasons for one thing. So I think it's really important to know that everything in life and business and parenting is seasonal, and so we find that we have to kind of reassess things, sometimes every like six weeks, sometimes it's once a quarter. We definitely have these quarterly retreats that we go on, which we've talked about, which we'll keep talking about, go on, which we've talked about, which we'll keep talking about. It's a really good time for us to just assess our business, our family life, our marriage, all those kinds of things. But it's also important to know seasons. Sometimes it's the age of your kids, sometimes it's maybe a full-time job that you have while building a business, and the season you're in. Sometimes it's an illness in the family, aging parents, sometimes it's one of your children going through a therapy or something like that. So just recognizing that you will have seasons, and when you say no or you delay something right now, it doesn't always mean that it's a permanent decision.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, that's so good. Well, we're going to talk about scheduling according to priorities. We kind of talked about this, but it's worth touching on this. Is this your rocks, first and then, and then add in the pebbles? Honestly, you don't need to put the sand on your calendar. That will naturally get filled up.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But identifying your most important priorities and putting those on your calendar is a key, absolutely a key.
Speaker 1:So what do people do if their priorities are totally screwed up? So if you're listening to this podcast and you're like that sounds great, I'm all over the place. I can feel it. I can feel the tension. I know I'm not aligned. What can people do?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, first of all, identify what are your priorities. And you've got to do an audit and kind of look at your calendar and say, okay, Just like when someone wants to get out of debt, what do they need to do? They need to track their expenses. So where am I spending money? Absolutely, absolutely. So take a look at probably for a week, even a week, even a day. You can grab incredible, get incredible insight.
Speaker 1:And do this with your spouse or your family as a whole, if they're on board. But again, if you're, if you're going two different directions, that's marriage counseling or that's some type of intervention that you need, because it's gonna be really difficult if you're chasing two different rabbits and you don't have aligned priorities.
Speaker 2:So family meetings getting the family involved is also really important. What this looks like varies depending on the age of your kids, right um?
Speaker 1:and this isn't.
Speaker 2:We don't run every decision by our no and it's not getting their permission, um, but it is giving them an opportunity to get on board with things and also giving them some buy-in. Yeah, um, you know, in the past we talked about, um you know, one season, our business, uh, like, progress was measured by smiley faces yeah and we shared with our kids like, hey, when we get to this number of smiley faces, we're going to dizzy.
Speaker 2:Uh, and it gave our kids something to be like awesome, mom and dad are working hard, but they're working hard, so ultimately we can take this trip right and again what are you working towards what matters to you?
Speaker 1:so, in a season of our business when you were a full-time police officer, but you had made the decision that you wanted to come home and we had aligned on that value. So our new priority wasn't just me making 800 to a thousand dollars a month, it was making enough to, uh, you know, bring you home full-time to pay for our insurance, to take care of our family needs and um. And so we said we're going to do whatever it takes, work as hard as we need to work for as long as we need to work. But we did have some boundaries. We said we're going to work monday through saturday. We're going to work. You know, you work before work, you work after work, you worked on your lunch breaks, um. And then you know, and we told the kids we didn't ignore our family, we just put a lot of help into place and we said we're going to stay.
Speaker 1:You and I said to each other we're going to set aside some things we enjoy doing, like playing softball, we're going to get some help and we're going to take sundays as a family day. So for the most part, we didn't work on sundays, which gave us a little bit of time to refuel in our marriage and in our family so we could work the other six days of the week. And we were just driven because we knew what we were going towards. We were starting to build a life of uncommon freedom. We weren't there yet, but we were willing to sacrifice and we said no to a lot of things that other people would not be willing to say no to. And that's the interesting thing. You know what do the quote unquote 1%? Do they do what the other 99% are not willing to do?
Speaker 2:And the other thing is identifying things. That and this kind of goes back to the capable versus capacity. In this season it's really important to look at things and decide does this have the impact that I want? So when I first came home, I would volunteer at the kids' school and a lot of times volunteering ended up meant I was working in the office making copies and doing things like that.
Speaker 2:And I understand that things like that need to be done. Teachers need that help. But for me, I realized that if I'm going to take time away from the business to do something at school, I want to be spending time with my kids, and so it was. I'm going to go to lunch, I'm going to play recess, I'm going to do those types of activities. I just my time was more valuable than to do a menial task like making copies in the office, and I'm not dissing any mom who feels called to do that. But we realized okay.
Speaker 1:You didn't have a lot of free time. Some people have a lot of free time, so they're happy to do things like that. They enjoy it.
Speaker 2:But we've also realized, man, time is money and so if the school needs cupcakes, you can either bake them at home and spend hours doing it, which maybe if you're spending time with the kid who loves to bake, that's a worthwhile opportunity. But for the most part, we realized we'll just either send money, send gift cards, or we'll buy something store-bought. It's okay the kids, don't you?
Speaker 1:showing up and throwing the football with the boys was investing in their relationships, getting to know their friends, and so that was a really valuable thing. So, again, if your priorities are screwed up, the other thing we'll say to you is have regular feedback loops. It's why we recommend a quarterly retreat and getting away together, having some time, and a quarterly might not be enough right now. If you're in a season where your priorities are messed up and you're working on getting them aligned, you probably need a weekly feedback loop. You need to get together, whether you're on your own or you're doing this with your spouse and you're just saying like, hey, how am I doing? What should I release? What should I do more of? What should I stop doing? Um, you know, and and just really take an assessment, because without that regular feedback loop, it's going to be so easy to just get 1% off track instead of 1% on track with the things that are most important to you.
Speaker 1:Another thing you can do is date nights Super important if you're married, to spend time together and not once a month or once a quarter, like, hopefully, once a week, even if it means laying on the couch together and having couch time, putting the kids to bed early, putting a movie on just creating that time together to really say, hey, how are we doing in our family life and our business? We have regular business meetings. Now there's two meetings for this. We like to joke around that when we have business meetings, because we work from home, then sometimes we're not wearing clothes and it goes a really fun direction. But we also need real business meetings where we talk business and so many people think it's just going to happen if you're building and working together at home, but it often does not happen.
Speaker 1:So it's important to calendar that, like you know, every Friday for us, when things are aligned and not so crazy, um, we have a day date and we try to go through some of our most important discussion topics that we need to.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, especially cause I'm the woman I run more of the household duties and things like that I will literally be collecting a list of things I need to talk to Kevin about, and maybe we're you know, ships crossing in the night and it's a busy time and I'll be like, hey, I need time with you, and it'll either be like, can we do it tonight or hey, I'm going to send you a calendar invite for us to talk, which seems silly, but sometimes in a season we just need to say hey, at 4 PM we're going to meet in each other's office and we're actually going to sit down and talk through some of this stuff and just keep a running list. And that also keeps us from interrupting each other all day or feeling like we, things like the balls get dropped. Um, and finally, if your priorities are are, um, screwed up, then you might also just need some professional help or counseling.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Don't be afraid to ask for that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely All right. Last, or number three, is set your schedule before someone else does.
Speaker 1:Oh man. We don't like it when other people set our schedules.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:I don't. Most entrepreneurs do not. It's amazing that we actually say that, but then we also let people run our schedules.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, Absolutely, so um it's amazing that we actually say that. But then we also let people run our schedules, absolutely, absolutely. So it's very easy to let other people drive our priorities and you know it could be clients and customers and there's a balance there. Right, you have to serve those people. But if you think about professions like attorneys, accountants, counselors, they set their hours and you work around that, right, you know if you want to go see your dentist on Saturday or Sunday.
Speaker 2:They're probably not going to be available. If it's an emergency you can go to the ER room, but you're going to have to wait until Monday. It's okay to have boundaries and no one gets pissed off or at least reasonable people don't get pissed off that those people, that those professionals aren't available all the time. So it's important to understand.
Speaker 1:Set some boundaries and that your priorities are not anyone else's priorities necessarily. So they wouldn't do it offensively, but they're quite likely not thinking about what your priorities are. So that's really important. Um, so how do we set our schedule? Uh, really, we look at our year, we lay that out, and then we go into quarterly and each quarter we lay it out and then we know that monthly we have to take certain action steps. Those monthlies break into weekly and then our weekly breaks into daily, and so if you don't take the big picture and move it into the small picture, it's gonna be very difficult to actually achieve things that you want to do in a year. And if you're only working on the daily and you're never kind of having a vision of where you're going, you can often kind of be running in circles and not realizing that you haven't really made progress towards the things that are important to you. So I think looking at it that way is really important. And then how do we protect our schedule?
Speaker 2:Well, we have really learned a lot in this department.
Speaker 2:We have I mean having the shared calendar is huge, yeah, uh, because although we we believe in you know communication is important. That having a shared calendar where, as you know, assuming you follow through on it, you put things on it and sometimes we make mistakes, but as a general rule, we can look at a calendar, say, okay, we're clear, we're good, um, it allows us to, uh, coordinate things with other people without it always requiring communication, so it allows us to be more efficient, but also many times, especially if it's going to have an impact on the other part, the other spouse when someone asks us to do, our default answer is I need to talk to my wife, I need to check my calendar, and it doesn't mean I'm going to look at my calendar right then, and there, it means I'm deflecting and I'll get back to you.
Speaker 1:Always better to delay a response. Absolutely Procrastinate on purpose for almost everything, and it might be 15 minutes or seven minutes, and it might be three days or a week, but whenever you're asked to make a commitment, especially a significant one, always take time to make sure it's the right fit for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. The reality is, get in the habit of create the habit of saying no. So the people assume that you're going to say no or I need to check. Um, people will figure out who the yes men are, who say yes to everything, and once you get pegged as that, you're going to get asked to do everything and we're not talking about being selfish or not being helpful in the world, but just be aware of is it your best?
Speaker 1:yes, because so many times we say yes to our worst yes, or our eh yes, and we do not give a priority to something that either we're good at, we enjoy doing, or we're the ones that should be doing it.
Speaker 1:And so I think when that happens, we often resent it and we don't enjoy doing it, and then you know, it just doesn't feel good and it can kind of ruin a lot of things along the way. So just being really clear, and if you're sacri, there's things I say yes to that I don't really want to do but it needs done. That's fine. That's part of you know, serving other people and not being selfish. But we've found that delaying it. And then if we can't or don't want to make a commitment or don't want to say yes to something, we found the most graceful way to say it is I'm sorry, I have a commitment and we're not lying. We're just giving a very general response because we don't need to explain every decision we make to other people and we want them to know that we have considered it. But there is something else on our calendar that we value more, that's more important.
Speaker 2:And this is where having your plan done ahead of time is a really good thing, because if you've made a commitment to being healthy, to getting enough sleep, ahead of time is a really good thing, because if you've made a commitment to being healthy, to getting enough sleep, um, to having downtime, um, things like that, those are all things. When I tell someone I have a commitment, I don't explain what the commitment is. It's I have a commitment. There's plenty of times where we say no to things on a friday because we have a we as a general, we have a standing day date we have a commitment to sex.
Speaker 1:We do absolutely that's. That's an important one. Don't ask us to do something on a Friday afternoon.
Speaker 2:But, but just that. I have a commitment. You know there's people who you know it's their, their kid's, birthday. So I have a commitment. You don't have to explain it's your kid's birthday party, it's their 16th birthday and you've got a pony rented or a uniform rented or something like that. It's not necessary. I'm sorry. I have a commitment. I can't make it. It's very simple and it's funny. I see our team using that verbiage on us and I know.
Speaker 1:I know and I'm like oh, I know what they're doing, we hear you out there.
Speaker 2:They've listened, we've trained them well.
Speaker 1:They're filing their nails in the background, in the back of my head. Sometimes I'm like walking their dog, but the bottom line is it's important to them and therefore, kudos on them for saying no to something when that's what's important to them. Yeah, and maybe we'll get into this in a different podcast, but because we do both work at home, we work in the same business, we have different skill sets, but we're doing very similar things. The other thing that we did to kind of clarify our roles and priorities, as we each chose days that were actually our work days, where we could be completely free with our schedule for the most part, and then other days where we were really more running the household and so we could do things when we have time and the kids are at school.
Speaker 1:So I work Mondays, wednesdays. That means when I schedule on Monday and Wednesday, I really almost never ask Kevin hey, does this work for you? Because I know on Mondays and Wednesdays he's taking care of kids, drop off, he's coordinating with any child care help, he's handling everything else we need to do pretty much until dinnertime, and the same thing happens for him on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Now, every once in a while things change, but for the most part, this simplifies and streamlines our ability to say yes to things. So most of the time we schedule our, our biggest commitments on those days so that we don't interrupt each other's schedules, or during the day when our kids are all at school on those other days knowing, hey, I've got to be done by whatever time to take over with the kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's been a game changer and once again it deconflexes. As long as it's to be more efficient, exactly All right. What's the line between being flexible and simply not honoring your family or personal schedule?
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, we said that this really depends on the season that you're in, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Expand upon that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. Well, just as an example, a couple of years ago we made an investment in a membership at a private racetrack it's about 45 minutes from our house. Learned about it from a friend. At the time none of our kids were of driving age or even permit age, but as a boy, or as a man who used to be a teenage boy, as a former police officer yes absolutely.
Speaker 2:I knew that kids like to go fast, they like cars, they like to drive. I mean, all of our boys are chomping at the bit to drive. So we realized, man, this would be a great opportunity to get them some driving experience, give them the opportunity to get extra driving hours under their belt before they actually start driving on the road. Arizona roads are extremely dangerous. People drive fast, they run red lights, they make left turns in front of you. We see a lot of accidents here.
Speaker 1:This is a defensive driving state, yes or it?
Speaker 2:should be.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a very offensive driving but you need to be a defensive driver.
Speaker 2:I love it. I mean it's much better than other places we've lived, but there was a lot of thought that went into it and you jumped on board very quickly. And it wasn't a cheap investment. But you jumped on board very quickly because you saw the benefit for our kids. Our oldest son absolutely loves it.
Speaker 1:He would live there if he could.
Speaker 2:His favorite thing in the world is to be at the track, and a lot of times he's like hey, can we go to the track? And my answer is we'll see, because we run our business and we still do some things, especially on Saturdays. On Sundays, we go to church, that we run our business and we still do some things, especially on Saturdays, on Sundays, we go to church. That's a priority for us, right? And then we have sports and things like that.
Speaker 1:So it's not just about him. We have a family of six Four kids, yes, so it's a busy life that we run.
Speaker 2:But his birthday's coming up. So when we said, what do you want to do for your birthday, he's like I just want to go to the track all day, like not just for two hours, I want to be there as long as I can. So that is a rock in my calendar for that day. I literally have it reserved already and it's on my calendar. It's committed. Other times it's a we'll see. But if there's other more important things, then we're flexible and I just let them know.
Speaker 2:Like our son knows that next Friday, you know, unless it's an absolute crisis or an emergency, we're, it's possible. But I need to understand that our business is how we pay for this right and so without the business, we don't do this to begin with. And, by the way, he's learning that even though we use a street car for the track car, that it's still expensive. There's damage, that happens, and so he's starting to connect the dots on okay, this, this is fun, but it's also it's not cheap. So just um, helping kind of differentiate. Like, once again it's a season, you know it's his birthday season, so it's a rock. Um, other times it's it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna hold it much more loosely the other thing we do is we balance what we have in our relational bank account with our children, with each other, what's in their love tank. So you know, how much time have we had with our kids? Have we been, you know, really busy running all over the place? Did we just get back from a trip of some kind? Maybe, from our marriage standpoint, have we been doing two different things, going two different directions? Or did we just have a wonderful family vacation, super unplugged, lots of quality time together? We've been playing games with the kids each day.
Speaker 1:So we will look at that flexibility and say to ourselves you know, if we've just been pouring into the kids a bunch, we have more relational equity. We can be flexible. We can say to them you know what we're not going to. You know, evie, I'm not going to have time to read three books to you tonight or play a game. We'll do that tomorrow or we'll do it in two or three days. We've got some things we have to do first.
Speaker 1:But also we will say, gosh, we have been so busy, we've been working a lot or traveling, and it is time to counterbalance, it's time to pour back in so that that tank does not stay empty. So I think that's something that if you kind of measure it and that might take conversation. It might take really knowing your kids or your spouse. Um, it might take just someone saying hey, my love tank is empty, or gosh, sometimes we see that in their behavior, don't we? It's like sometimes there's attention, getting behavior or acting out and it's like you know, I think their tank is low, they need refilled. So that's important.
Speaker 1:And then the last one in this category we would say is just we say that some of these things can be flexible, like we mentioned with dating our kids, but not optional. That means they need to happen. We want them to happen every month. We're committed to that. But we can move around the time frame in the month because life is fluid, very fluid, with four kids, a business, a marriage and all the things that come with, all of the beautiful, crazy mess of life.
Speaker 2:You know, I'll just throw this out there. I was listening to, uh, dennis Prager, uh, a week or two ago and he was talking about expectations and um that he, he kind of lives without expectations. Um, because he found that when he doesn't have them, when things go well, he appreciates it even more. And this is what stood out to me is that, um, like he doesn't have an expectation of health. He said he eats healthy, he exercises. But I realized, um, I have an expectation of health. I eat healthy, I exercise, I stretch, I try to get sleep, I ground, I cold plunge. Um, I have developed an expectation of health.
Speaker 2:Two months ago, but at 10 weeks ago, whenever it was when I woke up with um pretty substantial neck pain, you know determine, I had some herniated discs that are very slowly getting better, but it's significantly impacted my life. I realized I was very frustrated and kind of dealing with depression for a while because I had an expectation of being healthy. And his statement was a very interesting perspective on I'm going to you know of shifting of, ok, I'm going to do everything I can to be healthy. But we've heard so many I mean sadly, we've got a friend who two months ago, a month ago, passed away as healthy of a person as we could possibly identify. It was a complete shock. We, as his friends, had an expectation that he'd be around a long time, and that expectation added to the grief, and it was just a good reminder of learning to not have expectations. It's actually easier to appreciate things Like when you don't expect to be healthy. Um, you're, you're more grateful when you are healthy.
Speaker 1:So it was. It was just interesting, cause I mean, I understand manifestation You're you're directing this straight to me.
Speaker 2:No, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:Because some of our early marital conflict was related to expectation. No I mean expectations are tough, but as he was talking about this, I was like man.
Speaker 2:This explains why I was dealing with some depression, because I was like I need to be, you know, working out, and I just had this expectation. So, as we talk about this, I just think that it's a good perspective to keep in mind. So, quick recap we've covered a ton, but balance is about your boundaries. It's so important to have boundaries. Prove your priorities with action. And when it comes to your spouse and your kids, you can tell your kids that they're the most important thing, or hopefully, the second most important thing, but you're going to prove it with your actions. You're going to prove it with your actions. And we have also said that. What's it? Proximity is not the same as Presence is not the same as proximity.
Speaker 2:So we this is just something that we do Because we have four kids we don't attend every sports event that our kids have. We are pretty committed to attending the home games, but in Phoenix, where the traffic is crazy, the time commitment is incredible, and we've just decided to let them know like, hey, we're going to go to your home games. We may not be able to attend your away games because this is the impact it has, but also we're not with them in the same way, but when. But we really are intentional about having that presence versus just being in proximity to them. Right, you have a quizzical look on your face.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just trying to see how you're wrapping all that together.
Speaker 2:Gotcha yes, Prove your priorities with action.
Speaker 1:I mean the example that I would give too is like you know, if I tell Evie we're going to play Uno together.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then I'm on my phone all the time, then to her I'm in proximity, I'm not being present, she can tell I'm breaking trust. But if she's coloring and I bring my computer over to work next to her because she's busy doing stuff and so I am just in proximity, then that's generally not taking from the trust bank account.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Because she's not expecting me to be present in that moment. I haven't committed to it, so I think that's the other way that we can work from home really well together.
Speaker 2:There you go. I wasn't sure where you were going with it. And then last one is set your schedule before someone else does. This is so important Knowing your priorities, you know as far as family trips, you know exercise and things like that. Yeah, I mean, you're great.
Speaker 1:You rarely miss workouts because you schedule them in the middle of the dark.
Speaker 2:Yes, sometimes I work out from home and a lot of times they don't get scheduled, and so I end up sometimes working out late at night to get it in, or I miss more workouts than you do because of that. So it's a great reminder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Thanks for watching and listening. Remember, if you're watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe and comment with any questions. Kevin and I love answering those and incorporating them into future episodes.
Speaker 2:And if you're on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever else you're listening to this, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps the show so much by getting this message of uncommon freedom into more lives.