Why Working Too Much & Not Having A Balanced Life Can End Your Relationship

Why working too much and not having a balanced life can end your relationship & what to do instead.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who has been following my work for about 10 years. He’s now very successful making quadruple what he used to make and has three companies. He is married to his dream woman. However, he works 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days per week.

He always makes time to date his wife once per week. He is trying to save money to buy a house, but is worried he will lose his wife working so much and is very fearful. He asks my opinion. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular email is from a guy. He says he’s been following my work for 10 years, so the better part of a decade. Thanks for sticking around, by the way. He says he’s now very successful, he’s making quadruple what he used to make, and he’s got three companies. He’s married to his dream woman and he is the CEO of his companies. The only problem is, everything’s great, loves his wife, she’s amazing, but he says he’s working from like 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, but he always makes at least one date night a week to hang out with his girl. You can tell his life is pretty out of whack and pretty out of balance.

He’s obviously an entrepreneur and one of the, I guess you could call it, flaws that all of us entrepreneurs, and I talked about this in my second book, Mastering Yourself, is that when you’re an entrepreneur, one of the things that we have a hard time doing, especially when you’re building a small business and then it takes off and it gets much bigger, is that we tend to think that nobody can do things as good as us. So what ends up happening is us entrepreneurs, when our business grows, as we keep doing a lot of tasks and duties that either we’re not good at or we’re good at, but we hate doing, instead of delegating those to other people that can take care of them, or that are even better at those things than us, because that’s part of building a healthy, stable business as you grow is that ideally, as a business owner, you want to focus on your core competencies in life. In other words, the things you’re really good at that you’re better than everybody else at, that you need to really be doing and focusing on and the other stuff that you’re not good at or don’t like doing, you need to delegate away to people who just are jazzed by that. That’s their jam. They love doing those particular kinds of things, and I’ve done lots of phone sessions over the years with guys in this situation.

So the two biggest problems that I see in long term relationships that lead to the end of the relationship, it’s the same two things over and over and over again. The guy does not make the woman feel heard and understood, and he also typically stops the courtship. So you can see this guy, even though he says he has one date night a week, his wife’s very supportive, he’s very fearful that it’s all going to blow up in his face and he’ll be successful, but it’ll be at the cost of his relationships. So he fears losing her.

What this tells me is he’s not in a balanced, peaceful and relaxed state because we’re going to do our best work when we’re relaxed, and he’s not relaxed. I mean, when you work that much, it’s like you’re just a slave to making the money and you got to have a good work life balance. You got to have time where you can step away from your business, take time for yourself, hang out with your friends, hang out with your family, hang out with people that you love that are important to you, and just completely step away from the business for at least 24 to 48 hours at a time where you don’t have to do things where you’re not having to work all the time. So it’s important to do that because again, if you don’t make time to date your wife, eventually somebody else will. Just imagine throwing kids into the mix with this guy. Being at work and gone all the time makes things even more difficult. So he’s got some work to do on his life, to get it back to a place where he feels calm and relaxed, his masculinity is calm, and right now his life is out of balance, and that is not a good thing for his relationship.

When we look at somebody like Tom Brady, who I talked about for years and he and his ex wife Gisele always seem to present this image as perfect family, and it seemed great. She was always there supporting him. She was cheering him on when he won the Super Bowls. Then that last year or two that he was playing, she’s like, “I’m out,” because he wanted to continue playing longer. The reasons that she said in her interviews was that he wasn’t present. He wasn’t there. He worked too much. He was away too much. Even when he was at home, he kind of really wasn’t there. Now there’s a debate if she was cheating on him with the jujitsu instructor that she’s now in a relationship with, apparently.

I don’t know if you guys saw the roast of Tom Brady on Netflix. I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve seen some clips and it seemed like the comedians that were roasting him were all coming from the place of, “Oh yeah, your wife cheated on you, basically.” So it doesn’t look good. At the end of the day, like I say, it’s in the book. If you don’t date and court your wife, doesn’t matter how handsome, good looking and successful you are or rich you are, eventually some other guy is going to come along and date her for you. I don’t know what happened because he hasn’t really said anything, but there were some quotes on Twitter, but they weren’t verified that they were his, but it kind of looks like maybe she cheated on him. It’s possible, I don’t know. All I can go is off of what’s in the in the world of the public news, which oftentimes is a lot of bullshit and innuendo.

When I hear things directly coming from the woman, it’s the same thing over and over. He didn’t date and court her properly, she didn’t feel heard and understood, he wasn’t present and eventually she got tired of it and tapped out. Now whether she tapped out and then started dating this guy because she knew him. I mean, they’re doing jujitsu. They’re rolling around on the ground. If you’re a single guy and you’re rolling around with a hot supermodel and her husband’s never around and you’re into her, what do you think is going to happen?

So the question is just, did she do it before she left or after she left? Or was this the reason why she ultimately left? Because she had another guy that could be present for her and was present. He was there listening to her because Tom was not because he was away trying, chasing another ring. So I don’t know the details. Maybe it’ll come out in the future and we can talk about it then, but even Tom Brady, the most successful alpha male, if you will, the GOAT when it comes to football, who’s done it better than anybody ever has in all of NFL history. He didn’t keep his wife happy. He didn’t do the things that were necessary to keep his family together.

Character is destiny. Maybe she cheated on him. Maybe she hooked up with this guy after, but she knew him beforehand, so it doesn’t look good either way. It doesn’t look good. There obviously was probably some feelings and words exchanged between her and the jujitsu instructor, and then she dropped the bomb on Tom and left. They got their divorce. So we don’t really know yet, but it doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good for her. Doesn’t look like she handled things honorably because it doesn’t appear that he was out fucking around. He was just too focused on work and not on her. So his work life balance was out of whack. So with that said, let’s go through this guy’s email because he’s kind of got some of the same issues, but at least he says that he always makes time at least once a week for a date night.

Viewer’s Email:

Hi Coach Corey Wayne,

I’ve been following your work and a lot of other personal development and self help coaches full time for about 10 years after my first wife left me. 

I have read both of your books and there probably isn’t a single video of yours I haven’t watched.

You’ve watched almost 3,000 of my videos. I don’t know if you’ve been following me for 10 years, that’s possible, but read both of my books? Does that mean you read 3% Man 10 to 15 times or you read it once a decade ago? Because if you read it once a decade ago, that’s just piss poor effort. That tells me you’re not really serious. You’re cherry picking and half-assing it. You can’t do that with your wife. You already had one wife leave you, and the fact that you’re in a place of fear, the only reason you’re in a place of fear is because you don’t completely know what you’re doing.

There’s too much going on in your relationship with your wife that doesn’t give you a sense of peace, because you fear losing her, because you know things are out of whack and out of balance. Guys that don’t know the book backwards and forwards, that didn’t listen to me and didn’t follow it, didn’t take the time to read it 10 to 15 times, they’re going to typically be in a fearful place all the time instead of calm. Remember, you’re going to do your best work when you’re in a peaceful, calm and relaxed state.

My development has reached so high I have started and become a CEO of my own company and run three other businesses on the side, making quadruple the income I was making. 

I found the love of my life who is a complete unicorn. Beautiful on the outside and inside, very intelligent, accepts me wholesomely, listens with compassion and understanding, let’s me show my affection whenever I want to without dismissal…

So that sounds like she’s totally open to you. That means that she sounds like she’s heard and understood. Again, when a woman feels heard and understood, the legs open. When she doesn’t, the legs close. If you don’t date and court her, eventually, unfortunately, like Tom Brady found out Gisele went and dated somebody else, it’s just a question of when that happened. Did it happen when they were still together? Did she line this guy up while they were still together? It sure looks like it.

…And has done a lot of the same development work as me. We got married and she has made me open up in a way I never have been able to before with anyone. 

My problem is that I work 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week running my businesses in hopes to buy us a house and get us where we want to be in a few short years, where I can take a step back and enjoy my time with my ideal partner. 

Again, the courtship never ends. That’s the biggest thing, you got to be present for it. You got to date and court her, and you got to make her feel heard and understood. Every day when you come home, “Hey, babe, how was your day? Tell me about your day. What’s new? What I miss? What I miss while I was away, cutie?” And let her tell you you have to do that every day, because as long as you keep doing that, you never get rejected. As a matter of fact, typically what happens is she wants sex more than you do if you’re applying what’s in the book. So at least right now, at this present moment in time, as of when he sent me this email, she’s totally open to him and lets him have her way with with him or his way with her.

Again, like I was talking about in the very beginning of the video, pretty much every entrepreneur I’ve ever met in my life, dudes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, billionaires, it’s like we all have the same problem. We all tend to think that nobody can do the stuff as good as we can, but as the business grows, we get more of a demand on our time for other things. So you’re going to have to delegate away and hire people.

One of the examples that I used in Mastering Yourself was that I remember I was working with a doctor one time and he’s like, “I need help to discover my purpose. I’ve been a doctor for many years, very successful, but I’m just burned out. I’m drained and I don’t want to do next.” So when we start going through all the things that he really loved and really enjoyed, he still loved being a doctor and he really loved what he was doing and he was working on. He invented medical devices and things used in the operating room and stuff like that, and he’s like, “That’s really what my jam is. I really love that.” He’s working his ass off and he didn’t really have an office manager to run his practice. So after all was said and done, when we looked at what he was doing day in and day out and where the pressure points were and where he was spending his time doing things that quite frankly, he should have delegated to somebody else. Come to find out what he really needed is he needed an office manager, and he needed to hire another doctor to take on some of the extra work, so that would free up his time so he could focus on what he was most passionate about. Then his medical practice would provide steady cash flow to feed the medical device company. So he ended up hiring a really good office manager to run his office and make sure the billing was handled. He hired a woman that was really good at that, and she had a track record of doing that.

There’s different types of energy as a business owner. When you work in a company, you’ve got the manager type, you’ve got the builder type, the worker bee type, and then you’ve got the architect type. An entrepreneur, as we tend to be the architects, we tend to build out all the systems and put them in place. Then once we have the systems in place, then we turn those over to somebody that is a manager. The managers typically are great at maintaining systems. Once they’re in place, that’s just something that’s their jam. They get off on stuff like that. They like dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s and making sure everything is organized. They typically are a very organized person.

So one of the things that we did is we went through, here’s the duties of the ideal office manager for your particular practice and what you need to look for, because you need to hire the right person. If you hire the wrong person, that can completely set you back six months in your business and stress you out even more. So you need to get that right. You need to know what kind of person, what their temperament is and what they are really good at. Then you got builders. Which builders are the type where you put a system in place. They can continue to grow and build the business. These are typically like salespeople, people that go out and get clients, account executives, things of that nature where you have a good business model and you plug them in. They can bring in more customers, more business and that kind of thing, whereas the manager maintains all the systems that makes it possible, like being in sales, being in real estate.

What I found is that a lot of times people that were great salespeople didn’t necessarily make really great managers, and people that were great managers really sucked at sales. So you have to look at what are the core competencies of the person that you’re hiring or you’re working with and make sure you hire based on your actual needs, and you want to find people that really love doing the things that you’re either not good at or that you hate doing because they’ll be excited to do it, and they’ll do a much better job than you ever could.

If you’re running your own company and you got three other companies that you’re running, then maybe you need an office manager or you need a personal assistant, somebody that’s very detail oriented, somebody that can follow up, somebody that you can give a to-do list, and they just handle things. Not everybody you can give a to-do list and they’ll handle things. If it’s somebody, you got to keep kicking in the ass and motivating them to do their job, they’re the wrong person for the job. You need self motivated people that are reliable and dependable. So when you turn something over to them, they just handle it. Not everybody is good at that.

So you have to look at what they actually do. If you’re going to hire somebody that has a level of expertise, they need to have the track record showing that they’ve been able to do those kinds of things in the past and maintain good systems because again, you hire the wrong person, it’s going to set you back six months at least, because then you spend 90 days training them and then another 90 days before you figure out they can’t even do the job. Then you fire them. Now you lost six months, you lost all that time you’re not going to get back. Plus all the money you paid them and paid to train them and everything else and paid other people to train them. Then you’re back at square one because you made a bad hire.

So you got to make sure you get the right person in there. As Jim Collins said in his awesome book, Good to Great, he says, “You got to get the right people on your bus, and most importantly, you got to get them in the right positions.” Again, great salespeople typically aren’t very good at being managers or sales managers. Some of them are, but most of them are not. They’re just better suited to sales. Then you put support staff around them to make it easier for them to focus on what they are great at, which is closing deals. So you definitely need to do that.

Working 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week is ridiculous. It’s not good for your health, it’s not good for your work life balance, and it just saps your joy. You got to have a day or two a week where you just you do nothing. You hang out with your family, you’re present with your wife, you go spend time together and do fun things, and then you can get back after it Monday through Friday.

So make a list of all the things you hate doing in your business or things you’re not good at, but they’re essential. Then write down a job description of the ideal person that would be great at maintaining those systems or doing those tasks. So maybe you can pay $20, $30, $40 an hour or whatever it happens to be, depending on the skill level that you’re hiring for.

If you’re making hundreds of dollars an hour or thousands of dollars an hour on what you do and but yet you’re doing stuff that you can pay somebody $20, $25 bucks an hour to do, it’s stupid for you to continue doing things that you could delegate to somebody that’s going to make $20, $25 an hour and they’re really good at those particular things and that frees you up to do the things that bring in the big dollars. So that’s just something that’s absolutely essential.

When I do phone sessions with guys that are in business or fellow entrepreneurs, that’s a lot of the stuff that we go through because it’s like, that’s how I’ve set my business up, is that I do the things I really love and I enjoy, and the rest of this shit everybody else handles, but putting this off and saying, “Oh, I’m going to enjoy my life in the future.” If you’ve got that much cash flow, you’ve quadrupled your income, even if you hire somebody part time, you need to be delegating away some of that stuff so you can have a better work life balance.

The other thing is you got to read the book 10 to 15 times. If you’re in a fearful state, again, like when you’ve been following me for this long and, “I’ve read both your books,” it sounds like you went through the book one time many years ago, that tells me you only retain maybe 7% of what was in there, and probably forgot most of that if it was a decade ago that you read it. I say 10 to 15 times for a reason, and guys that take me seriously do really great and guys that don’t, well they end up like Tom Brady. Unfortunately, that’s what happens. So don’t be like that.

Don’t neglect your girl. You got to make her feel heard and understood and you got to continue to date and court her because again, if you don’t, you’re going to find out that she’s fucking the jujitsu instructor.

But I’m just feeling as though I’m away working so much. I keep feeling as though this one in a billion girl will become lonely and bored.

That’s why it’s super important when you come home, “Hey babe, how was your day? Tell me about it,” and be totally 100% present with her and care about her and what’s been going on in her life, because that’s what she needs. Where emotional affairs start because again, I’ve done tens of thousands of these phone sessions and emails over the last 20 something years. You see the same patterns over and over. Guy is too busy, he’s not paying attention, he’s not opening her up.

I did a phone session with a guy yesterday. Had a great marriage, everything’s going on. Come to find out, she’s having an emotional affair with somebody that she met at work. Started talking to the guy, so he became part of like her Frankenstein boyfriend project, and because he became part of the Frankenstein boyfriend project, the boyfriend was not making her feel heard and understood. So this other guy at work starts making her feel heard and understood, makes her feel like he cares about her because the boyfriend never really asked. Again, he kind of skimmed over that part in the book because he read the book a bunch of times before he ever got into a relationship, and then pretty much never went back to it. It’s only now that he’s got problems. He got back into it. He’s like, “Oh shit, I completely missed the importance of making a woman feel heard and understood.” You just have to do these things.

I always set aside time for us once a week. I buy her nice things to let her know I’m thinking of her. I’m very confident in my self worth. I’m good looking, successful, confident and I am whole within myself. But I am very grateful to have found someone that is so congruent with who I am. Being able to express my deepest thoughts without judgement, a true nurturer. I just fear losing that because of my work, and I see countless times men who work there butts off for there families and always end up resented for it. 

Again, they are not present and they stop, the romance ends.

Women want to be in a love story. It can’t ever stop. If it does again, you’ll find out she’s fucking the jujitsu instructor or the guy at the office she told you not to worry about or the next door neighbor, “Oh, he’s just a friend. You don’t have to worry about him.”

How do I overcome this fear?

Bob

Read the book 10 to 15 times like I talked about. You need to hire some staff, whether they’re part time or full time. You got to get people to delegate some of this shit away so you can free up some of your time. So you’re not rolling in at 10:00 at night. You need to be rolling in at normal hours so you can have normal family time, especially if you’re going to have kids. You want to be there so you can have dinner with the kids at home and things of that nature.

So I don’t know if you know, I’ve been talking about this a lot lately, but we started our Members Only content. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, underneath in the description, there are links to join the Members Only content on my website, which you get the email analysis on the six new video newsletters that we’re doing a week in addition to obviously the free ones like this one, but we’re doing six additional paid video newsletters a week.

We’ve got the full version of the podcast I do with the girls where we answer viewer questions the whole film day, instead of breaking it up into the individual questions like we do. Then obviously we’ve got the 3% Man Study Group where we literally go page-by-page with me and the girls because they’ve read it and highlighted a bunch of things where we discuss the book. So we just filmed, I think it was episode six yesterday, and we’re still like on page 55.

So there’s going to be a lot of episodes over the next year. I think what I’ll probably do going forward is once a year, I’ll have everybody re-read the book, or when we get through filming, we’ll have them re-read the book from scratch and highlight, because things are happening in their lives, their relationships, their news stories, things happen. They learn things that are in the book that show up in their life. So each time, once we get to the end of it, we’ll have everybody read it again, highlight it and then we’ll just keep going through it as a study group. We’re doing the same thing with Mastering Yourself. We filmed the first episode, so we’ll start releasing those. I think we got four episodes of the 3% Man that have been released so far in this study group, and I think the fifth one comes out next week, I think it is, or maybe it’s this week, so we’ve got that.

I did a documentary, kind of a documentary-esque, on the Hamas and the Israeli War. We put a lot of time in that. So that’s in the Members Area for those of you that are interested in those subjects, because that was a viewer question. So I got lots of videos in there, got good feedback on that already.

Again, the links are right underneath this video. You can subscribe on the website. Obviously you get the email analysis. Um, you get the all the the 3% Man and the Mastering Yourself study group videos. Plus you get the full podcast with the girls and any special videos or interviews that we do that are Members Only.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.