In this episode, I want to break down what’s really going on in this communication gap and how you can help your spouse to better understand what you are building and creating.

So… why are people not supporting the vision that you have?!

The first piece we have to understand is that when we entered into a relationship with that person, there were certain rules around how we showed up. A lot of times, women in particular, come into the world of entrepreneurship and are like, “Wait… This is so cool!” Maybe they’re stay-at-home moms and they say, “I found my purpose. I can connect with people. I have a vision now. I have a purpose. I have this whole other friend group.” 

Meanwhile, your partner is asking, “Where do I fit into this?”

For a lot of network marketing ladies, they’re going to events, connecting with their team, and jumping on coaching calls. They’ve got this whole other life that isn’t a part of the life of their significant other, so we have to understand the layers of how you are showing up for your partner. Are they feeling a little neglected? Is there some reality to this? You’ve got this whole other life that you’re so excited about it and it lights you on fire. You’re staying up late, you’re constantly on your phone, you’re constantly on your computer, you’re not coming to bed early for some lovin’, and you’re getting up early. You’re constantly working on, thinking about, and talking about your business.

A lot of women will say, “I’m going to retire my husband,” and they’ll say this without even asking their significant other if that’s what he or she wants, and their partner is like, “What the heck, man? Why are you taking away my purpose?”

We have to recognize that sometimes we get excited. We just figured out our vision, we’re so excited, we’re going to create this cool thing, we’re in entrepreneurship, LIKE OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER. I HAVE THESE COOL FRIENDS! PEOPLE ARE DOING COOL SH*T!

We’re like a puppy when its owner comes home and we’re so excited that we pee all over the floor. We firehose information at people.

When is the last time you connected with your spouse and got their perspective? Is their perspective that, “I don’t know what you do. You just spend a bunch of money and you’re always on your phone and I’m not getting any lovin’ because you’re always looking at your business.” A lot of ladies will get pissed at their husbands for not supporting them, but boo, you changed the rules!

You’re the one that changed the rules of your dynamic and you’re allowed to change the rules. When you do, there is going to be an impact.

We want to look at how you’re showing up for your partnership.

Are you making them feel secure?

Are you making them feel safe?

Are you making them feel significant?

Or are you all about your business?

Some of this may resonate for you in your relationship and some of it might not, so if something stands out to you then maybe this is a place where you can enter the conversation with your partner or family member who’s not fully supporting you.

Even if you explain your vision of what you want to create, no one can see the vision that you have. People get upset. “This person doesn’t understand my vision. They don’t see what I’m creating.” No one can.

Some people can see parts of your vision, get excited about it for you, and see it in their own mind’s eye, but no one can see it in the way that you do because we all have our own beliefs, values, memories, experiences, and models of the world.

When you’re trying to explain the fullness and the beauty and the depth of your mission, purpose, and passion, it’s like going to a movie and then three days later trying to explain to somebody else the whole movie. You’re only going to be able to give them bits and pieces and when you explain it to them, they’re not seeing it in the way that it actually played out on screen. They’re creating their own picture for what it looks like. We have to recognize that there is a little bit of a communication gap and there’s not really anything you can do about that in terms of your vision.

That’s why your vision can only live inside you.

And my vision can only live inside of me.

And we can share our vision and communicate it clearly to other people.

And there’s a reason that this vision was born inside you.

It’s because YOU are the person that’s supposed to carry it out and cultivate this vision and birth it into the world. It’s not other people’s responsibility to understand what you’re creating. The people in your life are seeing what you’re doing, but no one is going to be able to fully comprehend your vision in the way that it is living inside of you.

The other layer is that there’s also a miscommunication in their understanding of the online marketing world. Building online businesses in the coaching environment is its own little bubble and a lot of times we assume that other people know what we’re doing. They don’t. My mom still has, like, four friends on Facebook. As much as I want her to fully support me (and she does), she can’t fully understand what I do unless I had her walk through it with me every single day. Even then she probably wouldn’t understand because it’s not her passion and it’s not her world and that’s okay. But because we’re in it 24/7, we’re thinking about it all the time, we’re consuming content around it, we’re taking courses, we’re working with coaches, we’re in Facebook groups with other entrepreneurs, and we are in it all dang day, we expect other people to understand it.  

It’s almost like speaking a foreign language. If I’m going to try to learn French, I’m starting with the infancy level of French, the most basic words like ‘ball’ and ‘nose’. That is their level of awareness and understanding of what you do, most likely. Maybe your significant other is a computer engineer or an accountant. I bet you don’t know all of the ins and outs of what they do every single day unless they’ve been talking about it with you for years, and even then you probably don’t fully understand what it is they do, what they learned in school every single day, and what their goals were before they graduated college to go into this career.

What’s interesting about the entrepreneur world is that when it comes to our “regular jobs”, there is no expectation for us to fully understand what the other person does, but because in entrepreneurship and this nontraditional approach to education and investing in yourself, all of a sudden significant others, family members, and friends are like, “Whooooa! You’re taking a big risk there, buddy. You’re gonna spend HOW much money on an online course?” Just because it’s not at a university or it’s not a doctorate or master’s degree, all of a sudden people get uncomfortable because it’s outside of their box of what they understand.

This brings us to this whole idea of INVESTING.

When you have an online business and you are trying to be the best of the best in your niche, you’ve got to get coaches. Olympians and Broadway performers have coaches. They have people who train them and they have people who can objectively look at what they’re doing and help them identify their blind spots so that they can grow more quickly.

It’s nontraditional. You’re breaking the rules.

When you look at industries like Olympians, it is almost more like that than it is working a nine to five because it’s outside the realm of what other people understand. We have crazy work ethics where we’re like, “I’m going to birth this vision. I’m going to make this business happen no matter what,” and the Olympians are like, “I’m going be an Olympic athlete no matter what.”

There’s a certain level of dedication, tenacity, going against the grain, and being at a certain level of excellence that other people can’t wrap their minds around. You do not need to play small because other people don’t understand your vision.

You can try to help bring them along the journey and trust me, I had a lot of pushback from the people in my life. Thankfully, my sweet fiancee whom I’ve been with for 11 and a half years, supported me from the get go. Both of us had met each other as musical theatre performers so that was already a little bit outside the box. He tells me, “Listen, you do you, whatever it takes and whatever you need to do. Get the training that you need. No questions asked.” 110 percent support from day one.

Now my family… they had businesses of their own that didn’t go so well. My dad wanted me to be a dental hygienist and he wanted my brother to be a cop and have a safe job and a pension and yada yada yada. I said, “Dad, I’m not going to be a dental hygienist, but thank you,” and he’s like, “But I just looked online and they make base salary 80,000 dollars a year.” We had a conversation the other day and he was like, “The reason I didn’t support you was because I just didn’t get it. I wanted you to go outside and network with people. I didn’t understand that you were building connections through the computer because I never did that. I was getting frustrated because you would sit inside all day.”

That was back when I lived with them and I was still building the business. I was in my mid 20s living with my parents, which I hated, but I knew that I was saving the money to invest in myself. They were very amazing about that, but they still gave me some pushback because they didn’t totally get what I was doing and they were worried, which was such a dagger in my heart! My dad was like, “I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand that you were doing all of these things behind the scenes.” A couple of years after that when I started having really big income months and I would show him, he literally wouldn’t have words. That was his way of apologizing, in a sense, and now he can own that.

It can be tricky with family. For me, it did take making a certain amount of money for them to feel my business is legit. That’s what validated it for them and that might be where your family is at, too. Everybody’s got their own rules and values around what makes something legit. I was talking to one of my clients earlier and she said that prior to now, she’s only made “play” money online. It was under a thousand dollars a week, so that felt like play money versus real money. I’m like, “You made sales online. People said they want to work with you. Don’t take away the power that you were able to create and generate.”

This is another piece that we want to look at. When most people see their partner spending money and they’re in not the entrepreneur realm, they go, “Whoaaaa, wait a minute. The savings account is decreasing. Why are you spending money?”

If you go to college, that’s not money spent, that’s money invested. You need to help them reframe the way they see money transactions.

When you’re looking at where to put money in your business, you want to ask yourself what the potential ROI is. When you’re having these conversations with your partner or with your husband, a lot of times men tend to be more linear in their thinking. Not always, but a lot of times they want to know the data, the facts, and the numbers. Women are coming to the party going, “But it feels soooo good. I found my purpose! This is my passion!” Men are like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s great, but how are we getting this money back?” They’re thinking very linear about how it should be point A to point B, but it doesn’t work like that. There are highs and lows and that’s what takes to run a business. It’s a rollercoaster.

If you want to more clearly communicate what’s possible, I would recommend coming to your partner with data, numbers, and facts and say to them, “I’m going to invest a thousand dollars in this course that’s going to teach me how to crush my sales conversations. If I just learn how to become incredible at sales, with the practice that I’m going to have over the next six months to a year, just think about how that knowledge is going to compound over time.”

With you getting that information today, where’s your business going to be in a week? If you could learn something like sales, you could go from closing two out of 10 people to eight out of 10 people. How much more money could you make and how many more clients can you serve if you close eight or 10 people? That’s just this week. What about this month? What about this year? What about the next six years and 10 years and 20 years? Just by getting this piece of information today. Because as you know, when we learn something new it takes us time to practice it and wrap our heads around it and get to that level of mastery.

For those of you who are getting resistance from a partner around investing in yourself and getting something that is going to change the trajectory of your business, you have to help them understand that it’s actually going to cost them and you more by not learning that today.

If you could learn sales today but you wait six months, you’ve now lost six months of income, you’ve spent six months doing things that don’t work, six months of time that you could have spent building an audience, six months of time you could’ve spent refining a skill set, six months of time that you could have been enjoying serving clients and actually moving closer to your vision and your purpose, getting on podcasts, creating your course, and doing all these things that you want to do.

It’s a Catch 22: waiting to invest until I have money, but I need money to invest and I don’t have clients yet, so I have to get clients, but I can’t get clients because I don’t know how to get clients because I don’t know how to close the sale.   

You’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got to take a leap of faith. You’ve got to jump. I had a thousand dollars or less to my name when I was transitioning my business. I invested 500 bucks into one of Jen Sincero’s program and l said a prayer. I got on a call with her and I asked her a question of should I do this or that, and she said to me, “I can’t answer that for you. You need to answer that for yourself.” I was like. “What do I do? I just spent all this money! I invested in the program.”

I wanted her to tell me how to fix my life and she empowered ME to make that choice for myself.

You need to decide what you want to create. When you have those conversations around investing in yourself with your partner, understand what they are perceiving your business right now to be. Is it that you’re just on your phone, twiddling your thumbs, staring at the computer? Maybe that’s all they see. They don’t understand the full scope of what your building. Is it that they don’t understand your vision? Maybe you haven’t communicated it to them as best as you could.

Maybe they don’t understand the world of online marketing and the earning potential of what you’re creating.

Maybe they don’t understand the power of investing versus spending.

Or maaaaaybe it comes down to your lack of confidence…

A lot of times women will go to their husbands or partners and say, “Heyyy…. I have this thing. I would really like to spend a thousand dollars on this… can I do it? What you think the response is going to be? If you come with an energy of apologizing or begging or pleading, it’s going can be an automatic no. Come on ladies, we got to get better at sales here! You’ve got to come with a clear promise. You’re already assuming your partner’s going to say no if you’re coming in with that energy.

If you’re apologizing, you already think on some level they are going to say no, so you’re bracing for it.

If you come with an energy of certainty, they’re going to be like, “Hm, what’s this about? Tell me more.” So if you say, “I found this coach, software, program, or whatever it is, and they are going to help me triple my revenue. I have faith that if I get these missing pieces filled into my business, I can 3X my income and start signing clients. I feel confident I can get at least four clients in the next two months and I could 4X my ROI. To get into this, it’s a thousand dollars, but I’m going to show you that I will make this back within two weeks. Are you on board with me? What needs to happen in order for us to make that happen?” It’s not a matter of “can I”… it’s a matter of ‘how can we'”. If you approach it from the intention that it is a non-negotiable for you, you’re going to get a different response.

I was talking to someone earlier who was feeling a little bit bad. She was saying, “You know, I’m a stay-at-home mom and I want to up level my income in my business.” We uncovered some things and she was like, “Wait a minute, I wasn’t supposed to be the breadwinner. Why am I feeling like I need to match that right now or that I should have matched it yesterday?” I said to her, “Yes, girl! You growing as a person is making a better mom, a better spouse, you’re able to contribute more to your family, and you’re creating a future for your family. You’re building something. It’s not like you just took the credit card and spent three thousand dollars on a new wardrobe and a spa day. You invested it in education. You invested it intentionally knowing that you had a plan for a return on that investment, a fast one at that. Did you clearly communicate that with your significant other?”

This is a real challenge for people.

Talking about money and finances in home can be a real point of stress and conflict and can create a lot of unnecessary tension in relationships. There’s enough criticism happening all around the world from other people in your life and if you can bring your partner to a place where you guys are able to pour your visions to each other, it’s beautiful to have that level of support.