Why Your Marriage Is Failing While Your Business Is Winning #698

Last weekend taught me a huge lesson about marriage, and it started with one rule my wife created that we now never break.

If you keep telling your wife "things will calm down after this busy season," this episode is for you. I've coached men for a decade, business owners, athletes, FIFO workers, and the pattern before every marriage breakdown is the same: work got the best of them, and the family got the leftovers. In this episode, I share exactly how Amy and I protect our marriage while I run multiple businesses, train as an endurance athlete, and raise our young son Freddie.

You'll learn:

• Amy's Rule: the one travel rule that changed how we do work trips as a family
• Why "when work slows down" is a lie ambitious men tell themselves
• How to align your work goals and family goals so they pull you together, not apart
• The calendar test: what your schedule reveals about what you really prioritise
• Why date time with your wife doesn't need to be fancy — it needs to be protected
• How to treat time with your wife like your most important client meeting
• The message my wife sent me that proved all of this works

Ready to stop putting your marriage on hold?

I'm opening a small group cohort of The Locked-In Life Blueprint™ , built specifically for married business owners who want a real finish line on the workday, more presence at home, and a marriage that grows alongside the business instead of paying for it. Spots are limited and it's application only.

Apply here → https://wkf.ms/4foUmo1

Transcript

The Weekend That Changed His View

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

Last weekend taught me a huge lesson about marriage, and I want to pass that on to you today in this video. My wife and I went down to Melbourne. We were there for a couple of nights, mostly work-related for myself, but we managed to sneak in a few fun things for ourselves as a couple and with Freddie, my young son, there as well, which was incredible. And what I want to share with you in this video is how important it is to protect the time that you have with your partner. Now, what we're going to go through is stop waiting for work to slow down. I'm going to show you how we can work around that, how you can protect time to date, and why it's so, so, so bad to keep pushing time with your family so that you can fit more work or work commitments in. And when you do that, I'm going to show you how to protect the marriage that you and I both know you want. So let's get into it quickly. I'm Lachlan Stewart and I have been a men's performance coach for the last decade. And I've worked with men in so many different industries, predominantly business owners and athletes, helping them take their life to the next level and become the best version of themselves. Now, more specifically, that means getting the marriage that they want, the life that they want without sacrificing the business that they have built. Let's get into it.

Amy’s Rule For Work Trips

Lachlan Stuart 1:17

So we went down to Melbourne, and the first thing that I want to introduce to you all is Amy's Will, which is essentially stop waiting for work to slow down. I am so busy all the time. There's many projects that I'm working on. I am an endurance athlete that is does a lot of fundraising and world record challenges for those of you who aren't aware of that. Did 58 marathons, 58 days, 58 states last year. We raised close to $200,000 for mental health. I'm also a co-owner of Yeah, Buddy, I'm an apparel company, and then I have my coaching business. So you could say I'm busy, but I'm not the only one. And what I noticed over the last couple of years was I kept pushing my home time or trips away with my wife because I had work commitments. A meeting would pop up, I would have to go away for a couple of days for a work trip, and my wife was always getting the leftovers. You can imagine the stress that that put on our marriage. And I know firsthand how many other blokes are in that same situation, whether you're working fly in, fly out, whether you have a business that requires stateside travel, you just be not being there can lead to you feeling like when you come home, you're a stranger in your own home, right? Your partner or your wife is a roommate, your kids don't really run to the door super excited to see you, and that's a that's a disheartening feeling, right? That that sucks because quite often you're going away to do this because you want to provide for your family. But the thing many of us blokes often neglect or overlook is that providing is more than just financially. And this is why it's so important that as a household you have goals that you're working towards so that you know when you would achieve it and what the trade-offs are actually going to be in order to achieve that. Now, when we're looking at stop waiting for work to slow down, my wife and I were like casually talking a couple of years ago, and this was like a joke at the time because it wasn't possible, but now it's become true, and I want to call it Amy's rule. What it was was my wife used to travel a lot as well, and we always had this goal that when I would earn enough money, I wanted to be able to, and we wanted to be able to travel together whenever we were doing trips that were longer than one night, because we thought, well, we're building this life together. Why do we want to experience so much of it apart? And with Amy's rule was that whether it's me or myself or Amy, where we're going away for one night or more, sorry, over a night, we would bring each other. Now that can be challenging because financially it's more expensive, logistically, it's more challenging. But we knew as a couple, and it now as a family with our young five-month-old son, we wanted to do that because we wanted to grow together and we wanted to be there to walk side by side and support each other. I didn't want to have to be away for night a number of nights and miss Freddie growing up and miss having dinner with my wife. That's so important to me and what I value. And I, you know, my marriage is something that is so important to me, as I'm sure it is for you. And so when we were going away for numerous nights at a time, you would always almost have to rebuild the momentum and that energy within the the marriage, where the first day you sort of tiptoe and you're like, what do I need to do to sort of take some pressure off each other? How can I help out? What do they think about me being away? Do they think I've been avoiding them or have I been lazy? And this is just my head. So when we travel together, Amy gets to see what my day-to-day life is on the work front, like meetings, premieres, sessions, and so she starts to understand potentially moments why I'm coming home stressed, why I'm coming home with a little bit less energy, or why sometimes I have to work late. Equally as such, for her, if she has to work a number of nights, uh, so go away for a number of nights, myself and Freddie will go and we start to understand it, so then we can really be part of each other's lives, and we really feel like we're building together. So Amy's rule was that if we're going to be away for more than one night, we're going together as a family, and that's what we have been done. And I'm not saying you need to do that, but if you're someone who always finds yourself just going, oh, when work slows down, I'll be able to take my family away, or when work slows down, I will have more energy to play with my kids, I will be able to take my wife on a date night, then work's never really going to slow down, especially if you're ambitious, especially if your business is growing, it's only going to get more hectic. So you need to look at some rules that you can create that bring you guys together.

Align Work Goals With Family Goals

Lachlan Stuart 5:48

So what I want to bring up here is obviously two circles, but let's look at it. We've got work and we've got family. And we just want to keep this super simple, we don't need to complicate it. Work and family. Now, within work, we understand you might have goals, yeah? And your family has goals. So if we look at it out here, let's make this a fat arrow. Goals for work. I'll put G and G up in the top corners. Goals for work, goals for family. Now, the thing that happens is many of us blokes, we set goals for work without really thinking about our family life or even chatting with our family about it. And what happens when you do that quite often because you're not thinking about the ripple effect or the consequences of that, the goals are pulling you away from your family, right? The time that you allocate the sacrifice is almost pulling these two circles apart. Just like if you're setting family goals without considering your professional career, it does the exact same thing over here on the right-hand side, where it pulls you away from your work goals. Now, the reason why I think it's important to find this sweet spot here in the middle, and I know people talk about this all the time, but this is where you understand that your professional life and your personal life are one and the same. Who you are at work should be similar to who you are at home. Now, obviously, if you're someone who does hard sales and hard deals all day, you don't want to be going around back into the home and being a hard ass with your negotiation and closing deals. No, you want to be a different version of you. But the goals should align, right? Your family should understand that, hey, from a professional standpoint, this is where I'm aiming from a fulfillment or a promotion standpoint and an income standpoint, and this is how it will impact our family in a positive manner, which is obviously what we're looking for in this middle spot. We're having those conversations. So then you can sit down with your partner and you can say, hey, you know, I'm going through a sprint season. We have a lot of jobs coming in. It means that I'm going to be quoting more or I'm going to be doing some overtime. I won't be at home until seven or eight at night. Will you be okay to, because we're a team, will you be okay to hold the whole home front down while I'm doing that? I believe it's going to last six to eight to twelve weeks, and this is the outcome that we're looking for, and this is how it's going to help the family. If we can get through this, this is a prize that we can have as a as a family. We can go to Disneyland or we can do whatever it is that you guys want to do, but that's where you sort of sit in that green spot in the middle there because you're aligning the goals. So ultimately, what we want to do, but we want to have the goals going inwards. Right? So that that way they're pulling you towards a centerpiece in the middle there. And uniting the family and the work front. That way your communication is strong, you're aligned with how the home life is going, whether you need to lead or whether you need to support, and vice versa, you're really able to get clear on what the roles are there from the home front. So I want you to think about that, but it's very important when you start thinking over here, stop waiting for work to slow down, which is an important one. Because if you want to have a strong marriage, you need to protect it. And I'm going to say the same thing for you as well. You, if you want your marriage to grow or any area of your life to grow without sacrificing the business that you've built or and or are building, right, you've got to integrate them. There's got to be some integration. And what that looks like for every individual comes down to the conversations and the the people that are involved with it because no two people are the same. So I hope that's a helpful first point. But that was so helpful for Amy and I over the weekend with Amy's rule, which I love. And we're going to Perth. I have another premiere and a couple of workshops in Perth on the 17th, so a couple of months a month away. And we're going over together for a week. So we're gonna I'm gonna do my work things and then we're going to have some family time, which is cool. Now that moves me on to point

Make Time To Date

Lachlan Stuart 9:55

two, right? So we want to look at here. When you're going away on work travel, right, or at any given point, you need to still prioritize the time to date, especially with a young family. I joked to this about my wife. I was saying this the other day. I was like, it's funny how we went out for a date the other night, and we're still only the only thing we were talking about was our young son, Freddie. And I remember saying to Amy, I was like, I remember when I said this to you, I had said I didn't want to be the couple that go for a date, and all we talk about is our kid. But we love, we think the world of Freddie, and we love doing that, but we still are trying to make time to find out about each other and to date and keep that jovial fun in there. So think about it like this. Now, we had this lunch, so when we were down in Melbourne, we went away for one night thanks to Oren's wellness, which is is one of my supporters in the in the fitness space, and they organized this beautiful lunch for us. And it was a wine pairing with some beautiful, beautiful food, and we took Freddie with us because once again, we don't want to have these reasons why we can't do things. Many people say, Oh, I've got to have my kid down at a certain time, or what if he cries, or we can't take him into this restaurant. We took Freddie with us and he was awesome, but we weren't doing wine pairings, and you know, when he did want a bit of attention or whatever, one of us would take him for a walk outside while the other would enjoy a bit of bit of wine or eat some seafood, and we made that happen, but we made the time to date. And the cool thing that we walked away from that afternoon thinking was there were so many reasons why we could have not done that. We would have easily said to ourselves, oh, Freddie needs to have a nap, or what if he cracks it, we don't want to annoy other people, or maybe we'll just do that another time, we'll find a babysitter. But we knew it was a unique and rare opportunity, and we still want to be a couple first, even though we're on a work trip, we've got a young uh family, so we made that time to date, and that was a really cool thing. And so, what I want to look at here for the second part, and for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you're seeing me with my messy writing here, but you can see on your calendar what you're really prioritizing. I've had far too many men come to me when their marriage is about to break down, and they're like, Oh, my wife's uh about to walk out on me, or my wife's just asked for a divorce. And I ask them, Well, why do you think that is? And they try to pinpoint a specific moment. And the unfortunate thing is that relationships don't just split from generally one specific moment, maybe there is, but there's generally splinters that lead to that moment, right? And this is where if you look at your calendar and all you've got in is work, or you're not scheduling time or protecting time for your marriage, I can probably guarantee that over time you're going to grow apart. And if you really value your marriage, like I know many of you do, you need to be able to point to it in your calendar and say, hey, this is five o'clock's where I switch off. And for those of you who follow our protocol, and I'll talk about that more in a moment, when we tell you how to close the workday, so you'll know when you're finishing. As a business owner, it's so hard to know when you're finishing because you don't have set hours. You could literally work 24-7 if you could not sleep. But also, what's the reset for when you walk through the door so that you're not rolling through the door physically, but your head's at heads at work? We want to be able to give you that process so that if we look at your calendar, okay, you're able to point to the time where you're investing in your marriage. You're able to point to the time where you're prioritizing anything that is important to you. And that's what I was able to do. We had this lunch scheduled. My wife and I have other date, I keep saying date nights, but they're just date moments. Sometimes it's a walk. We went for a walk this morning. We're gonna go to the gym together after this video. We made those times, and a lot of the time it doesn't need to be fancy. We just want to have some time together, right? Some time to laugh, some time to check in, and that's what's important to us. So make sure you look at your calendar on that and go, where is the time that I have allocated to prioritize my marriage?

Put Marriage Time On The Calendar

Lachlan Stuart 14:02

Now, once again, for those of you following along on YouTube, this one's a very simple part. So if we look here, the easy thing around protection, and you're like, Well, what's protection? Protection is protecting the time with your marriage. How many times have you scheduled something with your partner or even just told your partner I'll be home by three o'clock or five o'clock, and then five o'clock becomes 5 30, which becomes six o'clock, and then you're running late and you're running through the door, and you're like, so sorry, I got caught up. Or you might have scheduled a weekend away, and then something happens at work, and then you go, Oh man, I need to be here for this. I have to push the holiday. To me, what that is, is you're constantly letting your family down. Now, once or twice it doesn't matter. But you and I both know that it's not just once or twice, it's it's quite frequently. And so we need to look at the appointments that we make with our partners or wives as a non-negotiable. We need to treat it like it would be a client meeting, a meeting with your accountant, any important meeting that you know you don't want to push, even your doctor. Because if you treat it like that, you won't need to justify anything. You'll just say something, for example, you're trying to book a meeting with me, and I know that it's 12 or 12.30 is my meeting today with my wife, where we're going to the gym. 12.30 today, you want to get a meeting. I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry you can't get on that because I have a meeting then. Let me just check. Oh, that's 1.30, cool. Because I have a meeting with my wife then, and I treat it as such, and I don't even have to say

Protect Plans Like Non Negotiables

Lachlan Stuart 15:42

what the meeting is, I just know that there's an important meeting there that I've already set the intent to go to. And that's how we maximize those times. But if you just go, oh, it's just I've scheduled something for my wife, she she'll understand. If you think they'll always understand, yeah, like I said, once or twice, that's okay. But if you keep doing that, you're eroding the trust that your partner and wife have with you. And if you think your marriage is really important to you, you need to prove it. You need to be able to look back on your week and point to times where you had intentional time, not just you guys live in the same household, so you see each other kind of time. No, you need to have intentional time because that's what makes things grow. Intentional gym sessions make your muscles grow as opposed to just hanging out in the gym. So that is the same with your marriage. The reason why I bring this up is I had this beautiful weekend away with my wife, and I was sitting there reflecting. I'm like, how lucky am I? Like, I'm away on a work trip, my wife's here, my son's here, we're having a date day with some beautiful wines, and we flew home. And my wife actually sent me this beautiful message, and I screenshotted it because this was this was where the idea for this uh this episode came from, and I was like, This is freaking amazing. Um, where is it? This is what my wife said. She said, Thank you for being such a great dad. I feel so lucky to have someone who's so invested in his family in every way. Love you so much. So, to get a message like that as a husband and as a father, it is proof, right? It is evidence that I am being the man and being the husband and being the father who genuinely invests in his family and not just tries to provide financially, but also provides through creating experiences, through giving time, through helping my wife out in any way I can, through building a great relationship with my son. And I know that you guys want this too. That is why you're watching this. And I hope that these three things have been good eye-openers

The Three Rules Recap

Lachlan Stuart 17:38

for you. And you look, you can take Amy's Real, but you can modify it to what it looks like for you. And I want to recap what this is. But the way that I protect my marriage and I get great messages like that from my wife is the first thing is I don't wait for work to slow down. We have integrated with Amy's Real where it's like if I'm traveling for more than one day, we go together as a family and we make it work, regardless of what it costs, regardless of the logistical challenges that come with it, that's what we do as a family because we're a team, right? The second thing is we don't make wait for time to date, like we make the time and we can reflect on our calendar for that. So, regardless of the chaos that's going on, and it doesn't need to be this beautifully created or curated date night, it could just be going to the gym together. But we're making time to do things as a couple, and I think that's the second most important thing. So make sure you look at your calendar and you just slot a few things in that are gonna work for you and your partner and or wife together. And finally, when you're protecting that time, which is the most important, because you can put things in the calendar, but if you do not protect it, doesn't fucking matter. You may as well not have put it in there in the first place. So don't push the time, treat it like any other valuable appointment because it is right. You don't want to, every time you push it, you're putting a wedge between you and your partner. You don't want to do that because divorce is expensive and divorce is heartbreaking. It's destroyed so many men's lives and and families' lives, right? For that matter. And the fact that you're here listening to this and wanting to be better and you want to invest in your marriage, these are some things, simple things that you can do. And so going back to that thing, you want to make sure that you have professional and and personal goals that are pushing the family unit together, so you're sitting in that slot rather than goals which are pulling you apart, as I did on that diagram.

Life Locked In Program And Finish Lines

Lachlan Stuart 19:30

The final thing I want to remind you guys of is with the life locked in program that I'm launching on September 1st, which will be a Tuesday, and and there'll be an initial cohort, and then it'll be you'll be able to join at any depending on numbers. But we want to help you get a finish line for work because if you're not having a finish line, once again, you're going to be the guy who says you'll be home at five, which turns into six, which turns into seven, and you're slowly eroding the trust that your family has for you. The second thing we teach you do is how to go home and be properly home. Meaning your head's not still at work, you're not pulling your phone out and doing emails while your kids are rolling around the floor or your wife's trying to have a conversation with you. No, you're properly home. We want to give you that, and then the final one is we want to help you get your life locked in. So life is no longer on hold. Like I said, you're not gonna say to your wife, hey, we will do that when work slows down. We're gonna help you integrate that because once again, if you're ambitious, work's probably never really gonna slow down. You're gonna be constantly pushing to the next level. So, how do you put it all together and live an epic life? Because I'm living proof. I do honestly believe I live an epic life for what I want. I have an incredible marriage, I have a great business, and I'm excited about what's to come. And I have so many clients that are in the similar boat who are working in construction, in development, in real estate, in fashion, who have learned these tools and it has completely transformed their life. Now it's not complicated, but it's hard to execute, and that's where we help you. Thank you

Closing Thanks And Next Steps

Lachlan Stuart 21:05

for tuning in. I'd love to love you to drop a comment below. And if you're not ready to look at taking any next steps with me, that's fine. There's plenty more videos around here that'll pop up somewhere that you can continue binging and getting little short tools and insights to help you build the life that your business was supposed to create. Thank you for tuning in. I will see you in the next video.