Getting Alignment With Your Spouse And The One Thing

Dan Austin: [0:02] Welcome to the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. If you're new here, these are the episodes where Mike or I talk about something that's relevant to the industry or just something that is top of mind for us in our business throughout the week. And today, I will be your host, Dan Austin, also known on all social platforms as investor man Dan. So if you don't already follow me, go and give me a follow. I'm particularly active on Instagram. For today's episode, I actually wanna do a follow-up to the Wednesday episode that dropped this week, which is where we answered a question from an instant investor program member who asked us, when is enough enough? And he wanted us to really just have that conversation about ambition versus contentment. So Mike and I spent the episode talking about our philosophies on this and our opinions, and you know, I find this to be a very personal question. You can't answer it for somebody else, and we can obviously help the conversation along, but it's a very personal question. And one thing that Mike and I didn't actually get to on this topic, that I find to be very critical, is how your significant other, how your spouse fit into this, and I'll generalize this to how your stakeholders fit into this, and by stakeholders, I mean those people that are significantly impacted by your ambition, by your contentment, or the lack thereof, either of those. And those could even, you know, be your kids, but just generally speaking, most commonly, it's a spouse or a significant other within your life. And it's critical because you can have all this ambition, or you can just sit back and say, I'm content with where I'm at, but if you don't have that same alignment with your significant other, it's going to create a friction point, and it's going to make sure that you're not content, or it's going to make sure that you cannot be ambitious, because that friction point over time, that little piece of sand in the bearing of your system will just wreak havoc, and that's where I feel like you see these folks that have created, that have reached, you know, financial heights when it comes to their goals, yet they are miserable, That's because they didn't gain alignment in all aspects of their life, including bringing their significant other along and up to speed with where they're at.

Dan Austin: [2:15] So, I wanna dive in to just talk about alignment, and how to gain that alignment, by sharing my example of how my wife and I have done it, and how we did it this year, and maybe that'll help inspire you, or just show you a different way of doing things. So, we sat down, did our annual goal setting meeting here just a couple weeks ago, and in this goal setting meeting, we discussed different goals, it's not just financial, it's not just business, but it's also like relationships, our relationship, our relationship with our family, travel, like, what do we wanna do for adventures, all that sort of stuff. And we start out with kind of like, here's where we're at currently, here's where we wanna be in the next twelve months, and then here's how these this next twelve months feeds into the larger picture for us as a family unit, and for us as a couple, and all the little things that we can do to build up to that twelve month goal, that five month goal, that larger that larger picture as well. And it's kinda cool because I had there were some things I was misaligned with with my wife, and one of them being, I'll just I'll just start out as, this is not my wife's shtick, like, she doesn't do a lot of self development, she's not a big, like, go to a seminar and start setting goals, and all this stuff that, you know, I kind of am, you know, I get excited about this sort of stuff.

Dan Austin: [3:31] And in her defense, it's not common, it's not typical to do that, it's very uncommon for couples to sit down and actually go over their life goals together every year, and check-in with their quarterly rocks, or whatever you end up doing. And that's, you know, reason I believe that is because if you're sitting in our normal cultural framework, which is to to work a w two job, there are boundaries within that culture and that lifestyle that make it to where your goals are somewhat limited, or at least the the purview of those goals are somewhat limited because you have things like a salary that goes up two, three, 5% a year if you're lucky, you have a a bonus structure that can only go to a certain limit, you have vacation time that only allows you to travel to certain destinations, and all these other boundaries that life provides that are created within that culture of the typical couple working together on goals. For my wife and I specifically, you know, we started out in real estate by buying a rental property, just a single family home, and my wife's going, okay, she sort of understood that it was a good investment, that we'd get extra money from it every month from the cash flow and and didn't really dive too much into it as much as I did.

Dan Austin: [4:35] And then the next year, we bought another one and, you know, although she wasn't super happy with how much I was time I was spending rehabbing it and trying to stabilize it, she kinda got that, but then I took a hard right turn and I started a wholesaling business, full time off market real estate business, where we were flipping wholesaling, bought like 30 doors in like eighteen months, and like just did all this crazy stuff, and meanwhile, I was educating myself in real estate and finances, I was educating myself in you know, how to set goals, and how, you know, I was joining mastermind groups like GoPundits, all this stuff, where she was kind of on the side. So, just to get her to this point was a lot of work and you all, I share that just because other folks out there might feel the same way. So, let's get back to our meeting. So we found some areas early on in our our meeting this year where we were misaligned, and one of them being my wife's, you know, conservative financial nature. The other one being that my goal setting and her goal setting weren't able to fit, like, we weren't able to accomplish what we both wanted in the framework of how our life was set up. So we ultimately figured out by just literally just writing things down and listing them out and saying, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want? Back and forth. It came down to that my wife needed to take a six month sabbatical from work to kind of help at home with the kids, and do things, and accomplish her goals that she couldn't do, and she couldn't feel good about doing while working her full time job.

Dan Austin: [6:01] And so, as we wrote it down, and we kinda asked ourselves the questions of like worst case scenario, it became a whole lot less scary, and it and it was us doing it together instead of one of us making that decision and feeling like we have to chart the course ourselves. So that's also just, I guess, a side note, another benefit of of coming together on those goals and creating those common viewpoints, while we're also rowing the boat in the same direction and allowing ourselves to accomplish not just our goals as a couple, but as individuals. So, that's just, you know, just a quick example of our goal setting, you know, and and how that went, and I think some of the benefits that you can glean from just doing that simple, like, here's our current state, here's where I wanna go, does that align with you? I think those are the benefits. If you're like, dang, Dan, I I like this idea, I wanna sit down with my spouse or my stakeholders, and I wanna do the same thing, but how do I do it? Well, I'll share just one tool, and it's not the best tool, it's not the greatest tool, I don't make any money by sharing it, it's just something that I found, and I discovered as I was helping learn how to do this myself, that was actually the book, The One Thing, and I didn't actually read the book, honestly, I'll be honest with you, but I have used all the resources that shake out from that book. But I will summarize the book in one sentence that I found, and and I knew this from other folks that have shared the book with me, but it's this is the one sentence you should just think about the book is, what's the one thing that I can do such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary? So just the synopsis is, they're just trying to say, what is that one thing? How can you clear out all the clutter and just focus on that one thing? And then the idea being that you can accomplish some Yeah.

Dan Austin: [7:41] How I got turned on to this whole this whole suite of tools was Wendy and Jay Papazan's couples goal setting retreat framework. It's like an eight or nine page PDF document that was given to me by a friend, and I dove into it, and I was like, this is super cool. So they go somewhere fun once a year, and then they they talk about their relationship, they talk about their financial goals, their family goals, their travel goals, all that sort of stuff. Anyhow, if you go to the 1thing.com, you can go to the resources, put in your name and email, and you can, basically, like, there's like a bunch of documents that they'll just give you for free, one of them is like a habit tracker, other is like a road map, and and all these cool things you can use, just as a framework, you don't need to actually go sit down, I didn't use their tools, I just created and learned from learned from them to create what would fit for me and my wife, and where we're both at in our goal setting journey, in our alignment journey, in our ambition journey, in our contentment journey. So, that's that's one tool you can use, there's a ton of other tools out there, but that, again, I'm just sharing you my experience, and I'll just summarize this by, you know, what I'm trying to share here is that gaining alignment with those significant people in your life is probably going to be the most key piece, and most key element to figuring out where your ambitions and where your contentment need to lie. So, if you like this, just let me know, hit me up on Instagram, investor man dan. If you wanna learn more about what we're doing, and how to start your own off market real estate business, you can go to the collectingkeyspodcast.com, and click instant investor program, the button there at the top. But also, if you like this, please give us a five star review, and if you if you DM me a screenshot of your five star review, I will send you a free collecting tees t shirt, which they are super nice. I'm wearing mine right now, very comfortable, make your arms look buff.

Dan Austin: [9:26] If you're women, I know that we have women's sizes, but we'll get you. If you're a woman and you do it, we'll make sure whatever whatever if you want a female version, can have it. If you want the male version, you can have it too. If you want your BDE, your Big Dan energy shirt, which which is inside joke if you're a new listener here, go back and listen a few episodes ago. If you want that, hit me up on Instagram, and I will send you a free Big Dan energy shirt. You can also go to the collectingkeyspodcast.com and go order it there. So anyhow, see y'all next week. Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.