Overcoming Business Stress to Achieve a Seamless, High-Level Partnership and Family Joy

Do you wanna have the absolute best relationship you can have? Ken is the best of the best. If you want the best of the best relationship, I have no doubt that working with him will get you there. And the ROI on that is so huge. I mean, the amount of joy that comes from having a good relationship with my partner, I mean, it's just un- immeasurably valuable. My name's Joe Carr. I'm from Austin, Texas. My wife and I started and run the nation's best natural baby food company. My wife, girlfriend at the time, and I had had a lot of failed relationships. We had a very high standard for what we wanted in a partner. And then we made the crazy decision to start, also start a business together. So we were trying to have a very high-level relationship, planning to have a baby, started this baby food company business, and it was just a lot of stress on the relationship. It was a lot of, of time together. It was a lot of tension. It was a lot of important decisions to be made. We did get to a point where it was so stressful that we weren't sure the relationship was gonna make it. We're very different people. We're opposite styles in just about every way, which made us really great complementary business partners. We felt a lot of love for each other. We felt like there was a way through this. We just had a really hard time figuring it out until we found Ken, and he was, uh, one of the main trainers at the coaching program I went through. And when we were looking for a relationship coach, I asked a couple of my friends, like, "Any ideas? Who would be a good coach?" And he said, "Actually, Ken Blackman started doing relationship coaching, and people seem to be having a really good experience." And I'd remembered how much I'd connected with him and how much I respected him. And then we had our initial call, and she was blown away, was like, "Let's hire this guy right now. This is exactly what we need." If we want the best relationship, we're doing these great things in the world, I want the best, and we'll pay for the best, and, and that will, will, will create m- more abundance, and it absolutely did. One of Ken's superpowers is we both always feel like he's on our side, and he can translate what she's saying to me in my language and, and vice versa in this really simple and eloquent way where he says exactly what I wanted to say, like it was completely right. There's no judgment in him. He doesn't have a judgmental bone in his body, like it's just whatever I said, whatever I reacted, however she reacted, whatever she said, it's always solutions focused. It's always empathetic. He talks about his relationship with his wife, and so I think that's just, like, cool to have him bring his, his personal self into that and to, to be able to give examples and to relate to the struggle. And, you know, he's not depersonalized like some coaches or therapists might think they have to be. Whenever we have trouble making a decision with each other, mostly, uh, really whenever we fight, we put it on the Ken list. We have this r- running list of topics for Ken, and we have him every week, so it's not gonna take that long to get it resolved. And just him being there has us be more, like, respectful of the other's feelings or more, more calm or more grounded, and we do not have the same fights over and over again. I think that's one of the really big, powerful tools is he will solve these issues for us. Since working with Ken, I think I've learned how to take an enormous amount of responsibility for my feelings, my actions, my relationship. Uh, he operates on this idea that relationships are not fifty-fifty, but they're a hundred-hundred. [chuckles] And if I'm not getting what I want and the relationship isn't how it's supposed to be, I'm 100% responsible for that. So he has just no tolerance for me in victim mode. There was this one session where he said, "One of us is no longer allowed... You no longer allow yourself to blame the other person and to make them out as a bad guy. You's no long- you's no longer allowed to do that ever again." And it sounded crazy. I'm like, "How did I just flip that switch?" B- but it worked. Like, I flipped that switch, and, uh, life's way better for it. What better place to spend time and money than on making my day-to-day, hour-by-hour relationship with my life partner and, uh, ultimately my daughter and family better, and there's, and there's just nobody better to do it.