Having someone to share life’s wonders and woes with is a remarkable gift – but it can be challenging to maintain a healthy marriage while growing your business from home. Here are 5 powerful habits to help strengthen your marriage while growing your home-based business.
#1 — Become Unstoppable In Business and Irresistible In Your Marriage
Doesn’t it feel amazing when you can hammer-out two important tasks in 10-minutes or less?
This habit is designed to create the productive home environment required to get things done while inspiring your mind to take massive action towards your important business goals.
All you’ll need to implement this habit is a copy of Napoleon Hill’s audiobook, Think and Grow Rich a pair of wireless headphones and 10-minutes (in a pinch, the downloaded audiobook on your computer and speakers can also work).
Here’s how to do it: choose an area in your house to clean, turn on your headphones, hit play on Think and Grow Rich and complete your household task. Repeat daily and whenever you’re crippled by fear or laziness.
After doing this for a couple of weeks, choose another spouse-delighting, 10-minute daily household task (bonus points if it’s something your spouse hates doing but would love to have done). Don’t be surprised if your productivity and marriage rapidly improve just from sticking with this one habit.
Think and Grow Rich “is the best single book on personal success ever written; it made me a millionaire—starting from nothing.” – Brian Tracy
#2 — Cultivate Confidence Daily and Avoid Demanding Your Spouse To Be Your Go-To Business Confidant
Unless your spouse is as passionate about your business as you are, over-talking about business will likely bore, frustrate and annoy your partner. This can be a major confidence and momentum-killer for your marriage and your business.
Instead, consider taking it upon yourself to cultivate confidence daily. How might your business results improve if you could go from fearful to confident in 2-minutes or less? How would your relationship improve?
Social Psychologist, Amy Cuddy recommends using your body language as a way to tap into confidence on command; she teaches the 2-minute power pose which requires you to take on a powerful, open posture for 2 minutes. Try it out: put your chin up, shoulders back, smile slightly, breathe calmly and hold it for 2-minutes.
Not only is this a great strategy for tackling business challenges, it can also smoothen the transition from work into relaxing with your spouse.
“Don’t fake it ‘til you make it. Fake it ‘til you become it.” – Amy Cuddy
#3 — Revisit Your Vision At Least Once Each Day
Napoleon Hill’s timeless system for success is based upon having a burning, purposeful desire that you are committed to acting upon. To create such a burning desire, Hill encourages you to visualize daily until your subconscious mind takes hold of your burning desire.
To begin the daily habit of visualizing, write down your most important goal, set a timer for 2-3 minutes, put on some inspiring music and focus on what it would be like to have already accomplished that goal. (Bonus: To save time, combine this habit with the power pose habit mentioned directly above)
To make sure that you and your partner are moving towards an inspiring vision that includes both of you, find out what’s most important to your spouse and incorporate those aspects into a shared vision.
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” –Napoleon Hill
#4 — Focus On Enjoying Your Down Time As Much As Improving Your Productivity.
When you’re driven to succeed it can be difficult to enjoy care-free time. Difficult as it may be, consider making it a habit to prioritize and protect your leisure time. In his book, Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracting World, Cal Newport suggests turning work-mode off completely for as much of the evening as possible (for him this includes resisting all urges to check emails, phone calls and text messages). Use this extra time to enjoy life…why not consider getting into the habit of weekly date nights?
“Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to achieve our highest levels of performance” –Ferris Jabr, scientificamerican.com
#5 — When You Work, Work On What’s Most Important
Tim Ferriss recommends choosing only one goal for the day and allotting 2-3 hours to complete that task. His two guiding questions for productivity are: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” and “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?”
This habit of focusing on your most important business tasks will help you avoid the needless worry that comes from not getting enough done. Now, you’ll be able to truly relax and enjoy your time with your partner.
“If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day.” -Tim Ferriss
For today: What is one habit you’re going to commit to today, that will make your marriage and business, much, much stronger and more enjoyable, 1-year from now?
Let’s hear your marriage and business-building habit in the comments below! Perhaps it’s one of the above habits, or maybe it’s another habit that you’ve been meaning to start. State your commitment and let’s get started with these habits today!
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