A great partnership is a recipe for success!

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, definitely true! I’m spending a few days on a business trip to the city and this morning I thought, gee it would be nice to stay here one more night and have some time to just enjoy the quiet. I text that feeling to my husband and he replied straight back, “why don’t you then”. He is seriously.bloody.amazing. It’s been one night and I miss him already and I miss my kids, especially my eldest daughter who has only just come home for school holidays, but I’m also happy in my own company. So I’m taking that pass and having an extra night. I’ll get some work done in that time too but I’ll also get to recharge my batteries after doing a lot of driving this week, and I use the time to reflect and plan.

So I’m now thinking to myself, how many husbands would do that? Like it’s no big deal at all. This is a guy that works his backside off in his own business and normally leaves home before I’m properly awake, and returns home when the rest of us are winding down for bed. It is this guy that has helped me achieve everything that I have to date. He is dealing with lots of his own business stress, and yet, holding the fort one more night with three kids in a little train carriage house. I seriously don’t thank him enough, or hug him enough for his contribution. I’m not much of a hugger. But I’m very lucky to have a supportive partner in life.

There’s a great amount of things I have learned in my career and in particular in these last 8 years as a business owner. In a session I attended today for work, we were learning about mental health and about taking care of ourselves. What an important subject. In this day and age where a lot of us seem to be on a never ending treadmill, always busy, feeling tired, onto our 5th coffee by 11 am, not getting enough time to exercise or eat right or catch up with our best friends, sigh…… In this 60 minute session it highlighted a lot of statistics on mental health and about ways we can improve it. We were asked towards the end to think about our current mental state and put a number on it between 1 and 10. 1 being very poor and in a depressive state, and 10 being at the top of your game, coping with anything life can throw at you, absolutely flourishing. I honestly sat there thinking I’m an 8, maybe a 9. To me that was pretty good considering life in the train carriage, it’s probably going to get even better soon.

So I think about how I’ve got here and just now I’ve been flicking back through memory lane after I looked at a really old family photo on the bookshelf from back when we were just a family of four, and Jason had a thick head of black hair. I’m noticeably younger in the picture too. We were about 27, Levi was still a baby. I looked at us and thought, wow, that feels like a lifetime ago. We have achieved so, so much since that time in our life. Obviously in the process of trying to achieve greater success for ourselves there comes stress, copious amounts of it, and there have been extremely challenging times. For instance in the last 3 years in our journey to build the family home, the home we have dreamt about since having our first child as baby faced 23 year olds, we have faced such great challenges that we never thought we would be at this point. We have moved house about 5 times (3 times within 13 months) since 2016. If you wrote a list of some of the most stressful things you could do with your partner, it would contain a lot of the things we have done. I’ll rattle them off:

• Buy a business (well we have two, double the stress)
• Renovate – we spent 6 years renovating our house and the minute it was finished we sold it.
• Move house – yeah, done it so many times my husband was ready to unload the furniture at the tip by the 3rd time
• Financial stress – well I think in addition to the first item which means neither of us has guaranteed income each month, you could say that we have stretched. I’ve also bought an office and we’ve committed to spending a lot on kid’s education.
• Build a house – almost finished now but yep, a huge undertaking. We’ve had three house plans, disappointment with bank valuations, the sheer time and energy and financial cost of trying to build a house for us has been massive. Hence it has taken us three years.

How the hell did we survive all this. We’ve done some of the most stressful things you can do in a lifetime, all within the space of 8 years. Crazy people. Sometimes we felt like we wouldn’t survive. But right now, for me, life is good. Because of how much pain and sacrifice we have endured to get to this point, I am so bloody appreciative of every single thing I have managed to put in place for my family and that we have all stuck together despite the hard times.

And that one quiet, hard working man that chips away, day after day, providing for us and allowing me to basically do what I need to do to succeed with my business and financial goals. He is the unsung hero. He puts up with my crazy, never-ending, Ferris wheel of ideas. He is my filter on what’s a good idea and what’s probably too far fetched. I also get to teach him a thing or two about business (he’ll never admit that though).

I imagine my future, sitting just like this, thinking about my past, maybe I’m 60 years old. I won’t remember the specifics or the tears we’ve shed in building our life, but I’ll remember there was pain at times… but I hope most of all I will remember the other 90% which was family time, holidays, music, memories in our home, the opportunities we’ve been able to afford to the kids should they make the most of them, and the prosperity my husband and I share together in our magical partnership where we support one another to achieve our best life. That is my goal.

Shonel x