Starting a business can be challenging, and it can affect your entire being and take a toll on your marriage or love life if it is not well managed with the right understanding.
As having a successful business requires you to be ready to dedicate your time and energy to it, so also does having a successful marriage. Both require you to invest time and energy. In a bid to succeed in all aspects, if you don’t know how to do it, you might overwork yourself and, in the end, have nothing to show for your labour, or one aspect might suffer for the other to thrive.
As somebody in business, you need to know how to balance marriage and your entrepreneurial journey without one affecting the other, and here are 5 tips that can help you.
Separate Work and Home Life: To be successful in this journey, you must be intentional about separating your work, personal, and home lives. There must be specific hours of work for your business and dedicated hours for your family, and none must come in between. To achieve this, you must allow your clients to know your work hours and make sure they respect those hours. As much as your business is important to you, your marriage must not suffer for it. Don’t use your business to care for your marriage to the detriment of the business, and don’t use your marriage to care for your business to the detriment of the marriage.
Have a separate phone for your business: Sometime last week, in one of my counselling sessions, a woman lamented how she was overwhelmed, and according to her, “Ma, my head is pounding and it has been like this for over a week with calls from everywhere and the children are on mid-term break. I had to pick up a customer’s call after 1 am today because I was still awake doing something, and he is one of our big distributors.” I asked her a few questions, and it was clear that she uses a mobile line for both business and personal purposes. So, it is difficult for her to turn off the mobile line because of her family. Now, if you have a separate line for your business and personally, you will be able to turn off the business line once it is the close of business and turn it on the next day at the start of business. People will understand and respect your policy as a result. If you are overwhelmed, it will affect the business, and you will not be able to function well.
Don’t joke with your support system: One thing that will help you balance your business and marriage well is to have a support system. Either as a form of house help (live in or live out) or people working with you in your business, you need a good support system so that you can have time for yourself and your family and you must delegate because indeed work no dey finish and trust me, if you trust your employees enough, they will do it well too. That is one of the importance of creating a system.
Prioritize time for and with your spouse: It can be challenging to manage your business and personal lives but prioritizing your relationship will help. Make time for each other and go on date nights. Make it a rule that every night before you go to sleep, you will intentionally talk with each other for at least 30 minutes; this can be just about anything. It will help keep the fire of intimacy burning in your marriage. If your business and time permit, you can just randomly meet up during the day and go somewhere to have fun. It might not be easy, as everybody wants to make money, but with intentionality, anything is possible.
Let there be room for effective communication between you and your spouse: Communication is a great game-changer in any relationship that will be successful, and here, this communication is two-way: one is communicating effectively to your clients or customers, making sure that they understand your business and policies, and the other is having great communication with your spouse. Be open with your spouse about your struggles, fears, what’s working or not working, etc. You must be vulnerable to get results because what business and marriage balance should produce is understanding between you and your spouse that will lead to you having his/her full support and being ready to help out with anything whenever the need arises.
Bonus Point: Set realistic goals and expectations: Remember that in marriage, we have children, and there is a need to factor them into your plans. Working full-time as a couple while you have toddlers might require a lot from you, and to avoid burnout, you need to see how likely it is that one person can get something flexible that will help you raise wholesome children. There has to be adjustment and compromise, and both of you must agree upon it.
In all, balancing work, business, and family can be really challenging, but prioritizing your relationship and maintaining a healthy work-life balance can lead to success in business and a thriving relationship or marriage.
