Love is a beautiful and transformative force that can enrich our lives in countless ways. It brings joy, fulfillment, and a deep sense of connection.
However, in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, we often find ourselves overwhelmed by responsibilities, work, and other obligations, unintentionally neglecting the relationships that bring us so much happiness.
In this episode, we discuss why you should prioritize your relationship with your partner, no matter how busy you are as an entrepreneur. In this fast-paced world, it is too easy to let our relationships take a backseat, to become an afterthought amidst the chaos.
You may find yourself caught up in the demands of your career, constantly checking off to-do lists, or consumed by various commitments. As a result, your relationships can suffer, gradually losing the attention, care, and nourishment they need to thrive.
In this episode, we will also navigate the challenges and obstacles that may arise when striving to prioritize your relationships. We will explore strategies, practical tips, and insights that can help you balance the demands of your life and the needs of your partner.
So, let us embark on this journey together, discovering the power of prioritizing your relationship and embracing the transformative potential that lies within. Love first, and watch your life and relationships flourish beyond your wildest dreams.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL FIND OUT…
- Factors that affect your relationship with your partner (01:25)
- The greatest gift a man can give his woman (04:25)
- The importance of having date nights (06:08)
- Must-try date ideas for a fun night (07:27)
- The importance of prioritising your relationship (13:15)
- How to treat your lover as an important client (15:22)
QUOTES
“The only world that matters is who you’re in front of right now.” -Carl Taylor
“The greatest gift you can give your woman is your presence.” -Carl Taylor
“You are the gift just as you are.” -Carl Taylor
“Your word is her safety. Do not break your word.” -Carl Taylor
WHERE YOU CAN FIND CARL TAYLOR
Automation Agency
CarlTaylor.com.au
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
TRANSCRIPTION
Carl Taylor (00:00):
Let’s talk about relationships.
Carl Taylor (00:16):
Hey, so you’re listening to another episode of entrepreneurs rising. And in this episode, I want to take a pause from some business discussions and talk about something I think even more important, frankly, and that is our relationship with our significant other.
Now, I recently did a post on my social media on Facebook sharing about a problem, a statistic that I read that I found really concerning. And it’s this as entrepreneurs, our divorce rate as an entrepreneur is 12%, higher than that of a pay as you go employee, someone who’s just employed. And that’s really concerning, but it’s also not surprising.
And this episode, in particular, I’m going to be talking to you, the men who are listening. Now, if you’re you don’t identify as a man, listening to this, please, you know, listen and take from this what you need to get the value for you or choose to skip this episode, because I’m going to specifically focus on men who identify as masculine men. Now, here’s the thing, men this is I think this is a big problem.
Because as the entrepreneur, right, we not only have all the everyday stresses that everyone has, we have all the added stresses and pressure that comes from owning our own business. And you know, some people, we are gluttons for punishment. And we try to run multiple businesses and add even more stress than is necessary. One is got enough stress, let alone trying to do multiple.
Now, why is that? Well, we’ve got the anxiety and the pressure around finances, how is finances going this week? And this month? Are we on track? Are we if we got enough money? Are we going backwards? Can we make payroll, then we’ve got the responsibility of well, we’re not just building something for us to live on. And for our family, we’ve got responsibility of other people’s livelihoods, mate, whether that’s your clients, if you’re involved in things that are key to their business, then that’s, you know, you’re part of their livelihood, whether you realize it or not, then you got your team members that you’re directly part of their livelihood.
And the success of your business ultimately decides whether they have a job or not, or how much they’re getting paid, then you’ve got decision fatigue, you know, we’re constantly as the business owner, especially once you get a big team, you’re constantly making decisions all the time, whether that’s for clients, team members requests. And there’s the studies on this have shown that there’s only a finite number of decisions that we can make in a day.
So there’s decision fatigue, which then by the end of the day, you know, we’re wiped and just exhausted, you’ve got the threat of legal implications, maybe a team member or client or just legal things changing in the marketplace, then you’ve got the threats of competitors, and other economic and bigger market changes and shifts that happen. And so ultimately, it can feel like as business owners, it all rests on our shoulders.
And then we go home, to our lovers, to our partners, to our wives to our girlfriends, and we don’t switch off. We go there, and we see our kids and we say hi to our wife, and fiance’s and girlfriends, and you know, our partners are lovers to a woman, and we say hi, and we’re there. And we you know, we’re moving about and we ask how’s your day, but really, and you know what I’m talking about, you’re only half there, or 20% there, your mind still thinking about that problem that you haven’t fully solved at work yet, while you’re thinking about the finance struggles, don’t get me wrong, you’re gonna have these moments, you have these little moments where you’re present and you’re there.
But then before you know it, a message comes through on your phone, because you haven’t turned off notifications. You see a text message or an email from someone important. And all of a sudden, you leave the conversation, you leave the scenario of home and you’re back into work mode, and you’re thinking about it, you go to the shower, shower, and you’re still thinking about those problems at work. So when you step out of the shower, you’re still in work mode. And so ultimately, you’re physically there with your lover, but you’re not truly there. And what a woman truly craves is presence.
And what I mean by presence is, as I said, not your physical presence that needs to be there, but ultimately, that presence when they feel like that you see nothing that them you know, when you’re solving a business problem, and you know, all you can think about is that one problem nothing like the world seems to just disappear and all you can think about is that specific problem or maybe you can step into a meeting and the rest of the world all the other issues disappear because you’re in this important sales conversation.
The only world that matters is who You’re in front of right now. I’m talking about that level of presence, that level of focus. She wants to feel that from you, about her. So how do you do this? How do you, you know, you because you’re not disconnecting from work, you’re ultimately disconnecting from her. I don’t want that from you. She doesn’t want that for you, you hopefully don’t want that for you or for her. So the greatest gift that you can give you a woman is your presence.
Now, I want to share something that I personally been doing. I you know, I learned this lesson the hard way, I learned this lesson in a previous relationship that ultimately came to an end. It wasn’t just because of this. But this was a big contributing factor, in my opinion, when I look back, because I can see how I showed up in that relationship. And it didn’t ultimately serve to create the foundations of solidarity that we would have had, when some of the other troubling times that led to the the end of our relationship occurred.
So I don’t want this for you learn from my mistakes. What I do and how I show up differently in this relationship is so many different things. But I want to focus on just one in this particular episode. And that is the concept of a date night. Now I’ve done date nights, weekly date nights in previous relationships to this isn’t a new concept. But the way I approached it in this relationship is completely different. And it’s really focused on how am I showing up.
So firstly, I’m fully responsible for date, night, date night happens every single week, same time, same day. I’m the one who decides what it is. I’m the one who prepares it all. All she has to do is show up and come along for the ride. She doesn’t know what it is, until sometimes I’ll give her a little bit of a heads up. But generally, she doesn’t know what it is.
And even if she gets a little bit of a heads up, I’ll usually have a few surprises that she doesn’t know about. If your partner if your woman decides, hey, I really want let’s take it in turns you do it one week, I’ll do it the next week, my recommendation decline. Say no, this is about me providing you a gift, I really want to do this for you. Thank you, thank you for that. But you don’t need to do anything. You are the gift just as you are. This is about me providing you some quality, time focus and appreciation to show you how much I care. I want you to receive this gift.
So I want to share a couple of recent dates, ideas, just to get you thinking about what you can do. Because, you know, sometimes these excuses come up of well, I’ve got kids well, I’ve got a young kid too. At the time of recording, she’s one and a half years old. I can’t I think she’s just a month maybe shy that but one and a half years old. So every kid’s different. I appreciate that. You might go well, you know, maybe he’s got a nanny.
Well, in the past, yes, we have had a nanny, which has allowed us to do date nights out of the house. We haven’t had a nanny available for the last few months. And so what we’ve been doing, and what I’ve been doing is ultimately having to get creative of what can I do at home. So every idea I’m about to share with you, these are real recent dates that I have done with my lady.
And these are all done at home. I acknowledged that some of these, one of them that I’m about to share with you, if you don’t already have some of the hardware, it might be a bit of an expensive thing to do depends on how you are in business and where your finances are at. So I’m not encouraging you to go and spend money irresponsibly if you don’t have it. But if you do, this could be a really simple idea.
So let me let me read off some of the things I wrote this down. This is from my my Facebook post. So some recent dates were VR putt golf. So with the VR pop up golf, what I did is I firstly I had some posters all around so we’re gonna have two storey house. So the downstairs is genuinely where I am with my office. We’ve got a big projector room. So the big projector room is where I typically run these dates. And so I put up posters on our staircase as they’re coming downstairs for like a golf course. So I created these these posters using Canva.
Carl Taylor (09:10):
plan them out, printed them out and put them up with Bluetec on the walls. And so as she’s coming down the stairs, she’s like, oh, a golf, because you know, this point doesn’t know what it is. And then I go oh, yes, well, actually we’re going to a putt putt range. And we walk into the projector room. And there’s, you know what’s going on, there’s not what, but what sitting there is to have our Oculus quest headsets. And so I just happen to have to, I personally rarely play or use an Oculus quest, but I have to. And so she put one on, I put one on. And I walk her through step by step how to join the VR game and we played putt putt golf, I cannot remember off the top of my head what the specific game was.
But we both connect into this. It’s just a game of her and I and we’d recently come back from Tokyo, Japan. So the place that we’re in was Tokyo, with cherry blossoms and it was the park golf course. So super simple found a way to create, what I would normally do is maybe go see a putt putt golf so if you Kevin any or you can get out of the house, go to a putt putt range. But if you don’t find creative ways to create those same experiences, so that was one another one that I created at home for an external experience was a picnic at a moonlight cinema. So if there’s a moonlight cinema that you can physically go to go and do that. We did that before kids.
But what I did is I put the picnic blanket down on the floor in this room. On the projector wall we had, I had a YouTube video of a campfire under the night sky. So there was like 10 pitches of tents. And you could hear the crackling of the campfire, I went outside and got a little mosquito zapper thing, and I brought that in. And then I put out a whole spread of foods and drinks down on the picnic blanket.
So I’m doing all this prep during the day usually or in the afternoon before the actual date night. And then when she comes down and when to bring it down. She doesn’t know what it is she walks in, she sees the picnic. And so we start with a picnic. That’s all she knows about.
And we’re just chatting away chatting away. And so actually is the moonlight cinema. And the movie that’s playing I think it was we did Harry Potter. And so I already pre selected a movie. And it’s one of her favorite movies. And so then at that point, we I changed the projector from the YouTube video to the Harry Potter movie. So we ended up watching the movie and having enjoying our picnic under the moonlight. Another one that I did was a comedy club, same thing utilize the space. And it was the comedy club was just a YouTube video projected on the wall of a comedian I found one that I thought was quite interesting.
Similarly, I put posters all around the place to turn it I tried to turn the room into a comedy club. So we had posters of all these, I think was about 10 or 12 different posters of comedians, I had a microphone on the stage and like a fake stage in front of where the projector goes. I was the person who wrote the tickets, we had armbands that we put on T shirts for show that you had entry.
So those armbands like you get at a festival, we then went outside to the bar area where I bought some non alcoholic drinks, we don’t really drink. So these non alcoholic cocktails. There I was the person the bartender with a menu, there was a menu that I use chat GP to tea to come up with names for the menu of the different drinks and food to have a feeling like it was a comedy club.
And yeah, I played myself obviously. And then I would sometimes just get a laugh, I would move into the other role and be the waiter or the bartender and I was the host to introduce the comedian onstage, it was just a really great experience, we get dressed up, we make it a real real thing of it. It’s not just Let’s go sit in front of TV or let’s I’m not using date night as an excuse for this is sex, if ultimately it leads to intimacy. Amazing. But it’s not something that’s like this is expected that we’re going to have sex. So feel free to borrow those ideas.
If you like those ideas, and you have the ability to do it, borrow them. But ultimately, what I want you to get here is the point is if you keep bringing business man home every night, and you don’t prioritize your relationship, like it’s an important client, you know, in your business, you prioritize important clients, but your home, one of your most important clients and you’re not prioritizing them. And what happens if, if they don’t feel important anymore, they start thinking about leaving.
And I’m not saying that your partner, your woman’s going to leave you physically. But she may leave you emotionally she may disconnect or not open up quite the same way. And that can show up in things like you know, going don’t remember the last time we had sex, maybe you’ve tried to initiate sex and she’s just always like, Oh, I got a headache or I’m not not feeling it right now.
And you can’t remember the last time you guys were intimate. Or maybe it shows up with like, Oh, she’s like constant. I can’t seem to do anything. Right. She’s constantly nagging me it just no matter what I do, I seem to be in trouble. It could be you know, we don’t have much to talk about anymore where you know, we feel like strangers or where we’re really just roommates. These are some of the ways that might show up that you have lost some of that emotional connection, that the date night gives you the opportunity to start to bring back. Ultimately, I don’t want you to have a relationship that comes to an end. I don’t know your story.
Maybe you’ve been through divorces. Maybe you’ve had long term relationships come to an end. My experience when my last long term relationship came to an end it was soul crushing, heartbreaking. In a way that was a beautiful gift that I can see now. You know, I’m so grateful for the relationship I now have and the way I get to show up Am I A daughter, and it’s just more than I could ever imagine.
But the transition to get here was an extremely painful one. And I’ve heard studies and people talk about that, you know, the end of a relationship can actually be more painful, like divorces can be more painful than losing a loved one to you know who passes away.
So, if there is an opportunity, if you have this incredible woman in your life, and you want to keep her, learn from my mistakes, and other men’s mistakes, find an opportunity to really show her how much she means for you and step up. And one of the last kind of tips I want to give you is, do not if you if you commit to a date night, whether it’s regularly or if you don’t truly don’t think you can commit to every week like I do. And then if you commit to it, do not ever, under any circumstances have are sorry, babe, not this week, I need to work I’m really busy. Your Word is her safety. Do not break your word.
If you make the commitment to a date night, Keep it keep it for yourself and keep it for her. Because if you can’t keep your word on something small, like a date, how can she trust you to keep your word to create safety on bigger life events. And so if you’re finding that that’s a trait you have where you say, oh, let’s do this thing, and you don’t do it, that’s potentially a bigger issue in your relationship than just not having a date night and I would explore some of that.
But if you’re going to commit to a date night, find a routine that you think you can truly commit to block out some time in your calendar. It’s a very important client where you prepare and you plan and you organize the date. Don’t make it a last minute thing. Or if it is a last minute thing, give yourself plenty of time.
There are some times that on the day of the date night, I don’t know what we’re going to do. But I give myself a good three, four hours or planning, I’ll go out to the shops and find props and resources. And usually within that time, I’ve come up with an idea. A lot of the time though, I’ve already got a new idea. By the end of one date night, I’ve already planned or gotten at least an idea of what my next one is going to be. Here’s the last thing I want to leave you with men, your relationships are part of your power.
Your relationship with your woman is such a beautiful and incredible thing. Don’t let it go to waste because you’re focused purely on your business. This is not about giving her your attention 24/7 your purpose and your business is really important you need to pursue that. I’m not saying don’t do that, or to put your relationship as a higher priority. What I am saying is you need to treat your relationship with your lover as an important client.
Because it’s so easy to get caught up in your business day to day and the stresses that you come home and you’re not the man that she deserves. And you’re not the man that your family deserves, let alone your partner. So do me a favor. If this thing to this has resonated in any way, shape or form. Take a moment, write down make some decisions of how you’re going to show up differently, how you’re going to utilize
Carl Taylor (18:10):
Your time to show them the people you love in particular your woman what she truly means to you and how you’re going to keep your word to ensure that you show up in those beautiful ways. All right, Carl Taylor. I’m going to sign out on this different episode for today.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, I would love to hear from you. If this has resonated reach out rising dot show or find me on social media send me a message I’d love to hear from you. If you think someone in your world needs to hear this episode, please share it, share it on social media or share it privately.
But really make sure that whoever needs to hear this message hears it. Until next time, keep up the journey.
Outro:
You’ve been listening to Entrepreneurs Rising. Thank you, dear listener for tuning in. I appreciate your time and look forward to connecting in future episodes if you would like show notes or any resources from today’s episode, you can find them at rising.show rising.show you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes as well as links to socials and or the ability to reach out and connect with me make your suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep up the journey.
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