SUPPORT

Is your spouse or partner supportive of your real estate business? Here’s mine! Today is his birthday, so seems only right to shine a little light his way!
In all seriousness though, he wasn’t always the most supportive of my business.
My husband works in the fire service. His work, schedule, paid benefits, time off, and paycheck every two weeks could not be more different from my situation.
Even though I have been the bread winner in our family pretty much from day 1, he didn’t always understand my business and the things I needed to do to be successful.
And since he didn’t always understand it, while he certainly was supportive of me, he wasn’t always of my business.
For many years in the beginning especially he resented my career, most especially for the 24/7 nature of it. You know I am big on boundaries, but sometimes … especially when you are just starting out and trying to get your business going, or are in the midst of negotiations … it just can’t be helped.
I remember the looks when we would have family over or a birthday party for the kids and I was on the porch on the phone with a new lead or client.
The nights that we would do our bedtime routine with our very little kids, and then I would go right back to my home office and work until midnight trying to catch up.
Or how about the celebration dinner for his big promotion and I was excusing myself over and over again to take a phone call outside for one of my agents (I was a managing broker at the time) who was in the middle of a situation and needed help.
Thinking back over these experiences, it is easy to see where the frustration is. From my point of view whatever it was that I was doing at the time was more important. More important than being 100% present at my kid’s birthday party. More important than spending an hour in the evening with my partner before we both crashed from exhaustion. More important than being all there for a big moment for him.
19 years in now, looking back, those other things WEREN’T always more important. Sure, sometimes there have been emergencies and time sensitive situations that needed to be addressed immediately, but more often than not those things could wait 1 or 2 hours for me to get to them. I wish I had learned this lesson earlier.
Eventually, I did catch on (it took a while, lol), and when I started putting better boundaries in place in my business his support for me also turned into support of my business. Because my work wasn’t always more important, there was much more grace and understanding when it truly was in the moment.
As they say, we’ve come a long way, baby.
Do you struggle with support from your partner or spouse?

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