When people look at husbands and wives doing business together, the most common reaction is amazement. How in the world could a partner be able to handle all the business weight and personal relationships all at once? This second part of the four-part series aims to help you look into the love languages of each other in order to find fulfillment and good relationship both professionally and personally. Identify the love languages and the love buckets that you have to fill for each other and dive deep into the core needs that will help boost your love and life.
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Get Real: Get Tight
This is part two of a four-part series called Get Real, Why Fight? Why Not Just Have a Job? I covered in the last episode how many people have attacked my wife and me. It’s a positive attack stating, “I can’t believe you guys work together. You speak together. You fly all over the world together.” They started asking questions and realized we have been working together side by side for 25 years exactly. We’ve been together for 29 years and it blows people’s minds. Some of the comments are, “I wish my spouse and I had your type of marriage,” or “How do you do it 24/7 next to each other?” First and foremost, I look at my wife, look at them, and go, “Look at my wife, she’s incredibly gorgeous,” and then I laugh. She is incredibly gorgeous.
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This episode 266, as probably every episode is leading up to Digital Footprint, is sponsored by Digital Footprint. If you don’t know what Digital Footprint is, go to DigitalFootprint.net. Watch the little three-minute sizzle reel. Just know this, you don’t know what you don’t know. Everybody needs mentorship and coaching. The reason you probably read this is to sharpen your saw a little bit in certain areas. Digital Footprint brings to the world areas about business and growth that you need to be concerned with that you don’t even know exists. It isn’t brought to you by just anybody, it’s brought to you by the people who have global businesses. The odds of you being able to get around people like the people on our stage in a three-day setting again is pretty small.
A lot of companies don’t make it because people can’t get along with their spouse. This is about how you work with your spouse. I don’t mean in your business. How do you get along? What are the rules of engagement? I want you to understand that these rules don’t need to be applied just to a spouse. They could be applied to an employee, a manager, a coworker. This is a Q-tip episode. I believe this episode is the single bit of glue of why our business is where it is now.
There are five love languages that you are never going to be able to avoid. The book is called The Five Love Languages. The first love language that a male or a female has is quality time. The second is words of affirmation. The third is acts of service. The fourth is physical touch and the fifth is gifts. You can go back thousands of years and study multiple languages. You can study the masters who have studied relationships, why they stick, and why they make it. I’m talking both in marriages physically and in business marriages. The love languages all melt into these five, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, physical touch, and gifts.
You can either play by the rules or suffer the consequences. Click To Tweet
Every person has a love bucket of all five but some of them are just the size of a thimble. They don’t even hold an ounce. Most people have one or two five-gallon buckets that are massive. My wife has three gargantuan love languages, quality time, words of affirmation, and gifts. If I want to fill my wife up to where she is overflowing with positive emotion, I sow seeds of quality time, words of affirmation, and gifts. Personally, I could care less about quality time and gifts. It’s not my love language. As a man personally, I’m words of affirmation and physical touch. 85% of men walking are words of affirmation and physical touch. It is what it is. You can’t change it. You can either play by the rules or suffer the consequences.
This episode is entitled Get Real. Men, here’s the deal. If you want to stay married, you better understand what your wife’s love language is. Most women, their only major love language is just one of them. It’s either quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, physical touch, or gifts. It usually isn’t two or three like my wife. She’s pretty rare. If you don’t know her love languages, how can you fill it? My guess is 99% of you don’t know her love language, which means you don’t on a monthly, weekly, daily basis fill it up. That’s mistake men make number one. Typically, they are words of affirmation and physical touch.
They think when it’s time to get closer to their spouse, they lead with physical touch and words of affirmation. A lot of times, and quite frankly the majority of the time, those two are not the women’s love language and it repels them. Men, their love languages, 85% of the time, are physical touch and words of affirmation. When they want to get close to their wife, they lead with that thinking, “This fills me up so subconsciously I’m going to lead with this,” then they wonder why when they lead with those, their wife does not get romantic. When a person is missing five things in their life, when there are five needs that are not being met, I’m not talking about five love languages. There are fifteen core needs.
Every person needs fifteen core needs. When five needs are not being met, they slip into anxiety. They begin having slight minor anxiety attacks. When it gets to seven needs not being met. It’s full-blown anxiety. When it gets to nine of the fifteen needs not being met, they begin to be depressed. Men, women, Q-tip moment. If you want to guarantee your spouse does not slip into anxiety moments, depressed moments, why don’t you proactively and consciously dig into the books like The Five Love Languages, Your Personality Tree, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and own these books. Read them and understand what these needs are. Then proactively and positively on purpose fill these need buckets. It will be miraculous how your spouse wants to turn around and understand your need buckets and fill yours.
Then you get the calm, serene, surreal marriage that my wife and I have. Years and years ago, Kerri’s father, Alan, an amazing man who I love, noticed that Kerri and I both had the type A driven personality and we were probably destined not to make it. He was probably right. Even before marriage, he sent us for marital counseling in which I learned some of the most amazing wisdom that has ever been poured into me. A pastor from stage split the audience apart 200 husbands, 200 wives, which means 199 husbands and Ken and 199 wives and Kerri into different gymnasiums. The main pastor went one way. The wife went into the other gym and spoke to the wives.
The very first thing he said was, “Men, you need to understand exactly how your wife’s love bucket gets filled.” This has nothing to do with The Five Love Languages. This was his analogy of his life’s discernment being poured into 200 husbands, 199 plus Ken. He said, “Every 90 days, you must take your spouse to an overnight trip with no kids. Every 30 days, you must take your wife to dinner with no kids, and once a week it’s called lunch or letter. You write her a handwritten letter. You take her to lunch. It’s either or, or send flowers once a week. Once a week, you prove to your wife physically that you are thinking about her.
Once a month, you prove to your wife by staring into her eyes over dinner. It’s dinner in a way where she’s got to get dressed up. She’s excited to tell one of her girlfriends that she’s going out. There are no children to distract so that you can dig in and find out how her life is going, and she can dig in and find out how yours is going. Then four times a year, minimum, once every 90 days. It’s a two-full day, one-night getaway. It could be in another town, it could be in your same town. It doesn’t matter but it’s unequivocally not at your house.” The 90-day one is so important because women by biological build must have something to look forward to. Men do not. Women must have some reason to buy new shoes. They must have some reason to buy new makeup or try a new hairspray. It is not optional. Ladies, men are not women. We’re not meant to be and that’s the point.
You need to understand exactly how your wife’s love buckets get filled. Click To Tweet
Women need that love bucket. Men, their love bucket is a respect bucket. I’m going to give the ladies on this show one of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard a woman give another woman. I’ve heard Kerri teach this I don’t know how many times. Women, do not ever under any circumstance, de-edify your husband. Edifying is when you lift someone up. Edifying a husband would be when the wife says in front of their two children isn’t your husband amazing for going to work at 7:00 AM and coming home at 7:00 PM and putting food on the table? In a business setting, when a new employee comes into the company, the manager introduces that new employee to another manager, if the manager says three to four great things about this other manager, they are edifying and lifting up the other manager in front of the new employee. With the goal being to make sure that new employee sees that manager in a proper light.
Men’s love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation. The words of affirmation lead to a healthy respect for their self-image. If you, the woman, in front of your children say anything negative about your husband, It’s like you literally dug a spoon into their skin and ripped out a piece of skin. It will never heal or be replaced every single time you do it. Just like a woman who doesn’t forget things in an argument, men do not ever subconsciously forget when a woman disrespects them. All you have to know is the right time, right place. Men, we’re buffoons, we’re idiots, we’re many times clinically insane when trying to make money for the family. I’m not saying women don’t get like this when they’re the breadwinner. They’re definitely insane. Here’s how this works in the traditional household sense. It’s called the right place, right time. It works in the home and it works in a business. If you are ever going to say something negative about your husband because he does something stupid, which he’s going to do something stupid every single week.
Every week, I promise your husband is going to do something relatively stupid to the woman. You go into the bedroom and you close the door. You say, “Idiot, why did you do that? That made no sense. That’s going to cost our family money. I can’t believe you did this.” It doesn’t need to be said in front of the children. Even when the wife slightly rolls her eyes and says, “He’s always late.” You don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s a huge deal because you planted seeds in your children that you cannot remove those seeds. It’s not like a computer, garbage in, garbage out. It’s garbage in and the garbage sticks, so you can never ever remove them. If you as the woman on a regular basis make slightly offhanded comments about your husband, you have a marital challenge that you don’t even know about. It’s just brewing and brewing it and at some point, your husband is going to explode.
Men need to know that what they’re doing is getting noticed. Click To Tweet
How many people over three decades have ran up to my wife and I saying, “How do you guys keep it together?” Many of our close friends know the challenges we went through in the late ‘90s. They were truly traumatic. “How did you get through that? How did you not beat each other up physically? How are you still together? Why does it seem, at least from the outside that you guys float when you come into a room, you sit next to each other, you hold hands, you love each other you’re constantly kissing each other, and your kids obviously love and adore you? How is that humanly possible in this stress bomb of a society when time is nonexistent?”
We’re all living on digital apparatus. The average father locks eyeballs with their average child seven minutes a week. That’s it. That is disgusting. It’s called the rat race. It’s called get up before they get up, go to work, come home after they’re home from school. They’re already in their room doing their homework. All of a sudden, it’s Saturday and Sunday. Then dad’s got to golf to blow off some steam. That is not the life my wife and I lead.
Our kids go with us everywhere. Granted, it took us many, many years to build something that would allow that. We sow seeds into our children eyeball to eyeball at a level very few people are able to do. It is attainable for everybody. However, couples will never get here if they can’t survive. Rule number one, find out what your spouse’s love language is. If you’re not sure, ask them. Do not misguess. That could cost you one to two years. Just ask them. Then ask yourself from a bank account standpoint, “Am I taking my wife out every 90 days for an overnight? Every 30 days for dinner and every seven days doing something special?”
Then as a wife, “Am I giving positive words of affirmation to my husband, in front of the children, in other people? Am I in an intimate setting speaking words of affirmation?” Like, “Honey, I just got to tell you, I don’t say it often. I do appreciate what you do.” That’s all he needs. He might even start crying. I’m going to tell you. One out of ten men, if the wife said that one time, they would start crying in front of her in the bedroom with nobody watching. I promise.
Men need to know that what they’re doing is going noticed. It’s called words of affirmation. Then physical touch. I’m sorry women but men are built in a physical touch fashion. I think God decided to do that because if you think of the act of what it takes to make a child, if men weren’t built the way they were, I’m not sure if anybody would procreate. With that, let’s get real. Let’s get the relationships in the household right so that the business relationships can kick serious butt.
Important Links:
- DigitalFootprint.net
- Five Love Languages
- Your Personality Tree
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
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