77: Wake-Up Call--A No-BS Conversation with Bill Storm About Business and Marriage

We're back with Make More Love Season Three and we've got a lot more to share. You are in the right place. This season I've got a bunch of interviews lined up that you're gonna love, and I can't wait to get started. I'm your host, Ellen Dorian. I'm both a relationship coach and a business coach. I've spent my career sitting across from business owners at the highest stakes moments of their lives, the big decisions in the business and the personal turning points that everyone has to face from time to time. What I know from that work is growing a business puts real pressure on a person. And it shows up everywhere in your marriage, in your health, in your friendships, and your ability to actually enjoy the life that you're working so hard to build. This show is created with men in mind because a lot of the relationship advice that's out there simply misses the mark for them. So in every episode, I share strategies, frameworks, and analytical approaches to relationship problems. I use the kind of tools that you already use in your business applied to the rest of your life. And we hear from men who are in it-- building their companies and figuring out how to do that without it costing them everything else. So if this is your first time here, hit follow or subscribe or whatever your platform asks for so you don't miss anything. I put out two new episodes every month. So, let's get into it Recently I came across an interview I did a while back with Bill Storm. Bill is a peak performance strategist who's worked with all the heavy hitters in the transformation industry. He spent decades with the Tony Robbins organization and with the John Maxwell Leadership Team. He's worked with executives and mission-driven organizations around the world, helping leaders align purpose with action. Bill and I had a no-BS conversation about business ownership and marriage. He was very generous in sharing examples from his own relationship. Bill Had a ton of insights, and today I'm gonna share some excerpts from that conversation. And then, over the next couple of episodes I'm gonna walk you through the five step relationship operating system that we talked about in this interview. Here's where we started. Hey Bill, I am really excited to see you today. I'm all excited to share with you my formula for re stoking the fire in your relationship.

Thanks for having me, Ellen. I've been married for 25 years and I've also run, my own business for 28. So this is, really something that hits home with me, so I'm excited to hear about it.

And you work with business owners too, so you know that we're all optimists by nature, right?

Yeah. Overly optimistic.

We're gonna sacrifice and work hard, but eventually we're gonna have a successful business, and we're gonna have the people around us that we want. And that usually includes, a romantic partner who shares our vision and who is game to live the good life with us and who buys into everything we're doing, and who's got our backs when the going gets tough.

Absolutely. The expression when you get together with friends or associates and they say how things are going Hey I'm just living the dream.

We hope they don't mean it Sarcastically. we hear all those stories about our colleagues and friends whose marriages are falling apart, who had to move out of the house and all that. But we keep on thinking we're gonna avoid the big problems. And we keep believing that it's gonna be okay, right up until it's not okay.

A hundred percent. I think that's the optimist part and the entrepreneurial part of. Running a business and you and you just know that if you hang in there, you're just an inch away from success.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that if you hang in there, the relationship is gonna survive, but you can't just hang in You actually have to take action.

Yes.

Just like you can't go to work every day with no plan, no strategy, and you don't execute, and expect a business to turn out.

Yeah I would totally agree with that. If I look back at my business life and I look at my own marital life, you put so much effort and you put so much energy into the business that you do neglect the relationship. By the time you get home, you're just done, like you don't have anything left. And there's the challenge, because you're creating this business to create this amazing life for your spouse and for your family, or a significant other. But then as time goes on, it just gets totally outta whack and all of a sudden, the business becomes your spouse, which is totally off. It takes that wake up call. That's why I love talking to you so much because you start to relate some of these things and it's just these little aha moments that go, wow, I'm just totally in a fog right now.

And, we often don't catch the little things, and then when they become big things. We realize we have problems and we try to fix them, right? We go to counseling and marriage retreat workshops, and we read books

Yeah. Here's what's cool about you. Just so you know I've gone to different things like this and I've listened to other people that try to give advice, but the problem is, especially if it's a female, a lot of the females are still approaching men in a way that, we're just not receptive to. It's just like having another spouse telling you the same thing. You are completely different. I feel like you get it, right. You understand men, you understand how they think. So your approach is so different that I would tell anybody this: Have a conversation with you and talk to you because, that's how I felt about it. Men won't naturally just open up about that stuff. There's always gonna be a shield or a guard or a gate or something like that. Until we feel comfortable enough to where we feel like that the person on the other end of the line gets it right. You have to understand men to understand what they're going through in their mind,

We're going to continue right after this message. If you wanna have that conversation that Bill mentioned, you can set up a call with me at relationshipresetcall.com. It's quick, private, and free, and it's just a chance to figure out where you're at and what might help. And we're back. You know that I have been working with owners of construction businesses for years. So that's one of the reasons that I have a practical approach and why I understand and enjoy talking to men, whether they're clients of mine or people in the trade association I work with. Listening to those stories and helping my clients, I came to realize that the same things I work with my clients to do, like strategic planning and operational execution, and innovation can be applied to your relationship to grow it and make it healthy too when you do that on purpose. Now, that doesn't mean you should run your relationship like you run your business, just use the same tools. That's what makes my method different from what you might expect and also easier to deploy in your world. Next, Bill asks a question that comes up every single time I have this conversation with a business owner. The question is, how do I start?

One of the things that I think would be super helpful is when things aren't right. How do you sit down, how do you even start with that first step how do you even approach your wife and say, Hey, let's talk about such and such, because, my wife she's not used to me doing that. And then, all of a sudden I want to communicate with her. It's like, How do I approach that?

Yeah. Imagine that your wife was your business partner and the business isn't going the way that you want it to go.

Yeah.

How would you approach that conversation with your business partner?

Yeah, that would be, "Hey, things aren't going right. We need to sit down and talk about this."

Yeah. You can soften that a bit, right? "There are some things that I would love to see in our relationship. I'd like to sit down and talk with you about that."

Yeah.

Yeah. So you know, if it was a business partner, you'd just do that.

I think in our heads, we have a vision of what we want it to look like. And I think especially for especially for me, you get disappointed with yourself when it's not playing out the way you envisioned it. It's like having a business that's not working. Yeah. And that, that, that hits you in the ego.

And I know it's a little bit more intense of an ego hit when it's your relationship. Because Tony Robbins, or pretty much any guru will tell you when your relationship is not successful, there's no way you can be successful

that's true.

So we need to make sure that our relationship feels good so that we can keep doing what we do in all the aspects of our life and feel successful in all those aspects. Yeah, so that's how you do it. You just say, I'd really like to sit down with you and just take stock."

Would you agree with this? Like your spouse would probably be happy that like she's seeing you make the effort?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely. If you go to your spouse, and you say, "I wanna make sure that you are happy in our relationship and I wanna be happier with you, and I wanna do what it takes to make that happen," what do you think is gonna happen?

Yeah. Yeah.

I can't imagine any spouse going, "Yeah, No. I don't think so."

I'm just thinking about it out loud. And it seems like such a simple thing.

In the next part of our conversation, I walk Bill through the first step of the Relationship Operating System. It's a SWOT analysis-- strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The same tool you'd use in your business. We're just applying it to your marriage. Bill opens up about his own relationship throughout, and it's a gold mine. Here's how that went. You and your spouse sit down and say. What do we love about what's going on right now in our relationship? What's the best thing?" Do you have a best thing in your relationship that you can think of, or a couple of best things?

Yeah we still enjoy each other's company. When everything is put aside, when there's no business involved, when the cell phone is off, and-- our kids are grown-- but when the kids aren't there and just being together, we can still have fun.

Great. That is what we all want is to be able to have fun.

But it's not, that's not an always,

so that is about your relationship strengths in general. Your weaknesses in general, if you're willing to share one or two of the things that trouble you most about your relationship right now, are you willing to tell us something about that?

Oh, yeah, sure. Why not? I'm working on being open, right? Uhhuh? Yeah. So challenging wise, I think the best analogy I heard was that, each of us comes with their own box and everybody thinks it's what they grew up with in their box is what should be in everybody's box. And the problem is our boxes are two completely different thing and it's probably true with everybody else. When you first get married, it doesn't come with a handbook on how to be accepting of other people's stuff. It's more like a shock and awe type of thing. Wait a minute, you think that's okay? Or, oh, this is what you do? That's weird.

Yeah.

I think there's a struggle trying to play the same game with two different rule books.

Yes. Absolutely

That's where, if if we've had conflict in our marriage, it's simply because of that.

Yeah, absolutely. So you start to get an idea how this conversation could go, right?

Yeah.

And either do it together or you could write them down separately and then share them and talk about them that way. If one of you is a really strong personality and the other one is not, then you might wanna do them separately so each person has the time and space to think their thoughts, because that communication dynamic does come into play here. So you do that, and you do the same thing for your opportunities and your threats. Opportunities: What could we be doing together? How could it be? Yep. And then the threats are, What are the biggest concerns, we both have about our relationship? If nothing changes from today. What's the worst case scenario? That's your threat,

yeah. What's the worst thing that can happen? That's a good thing to look at.

Yep. And most of the time, it's not divorce.

Yep.

Except for the financial consequences, sometimes divorce is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing that can happen is you live separate lives, in the same house, in separate bedrooms, never talking and still attached to each other without being attached to each other.

Yeah. That's like being in hell on earth.

Exactly. And neither one can move on. And so, to me that's the worst case scenario. Yeah. In all of this it's also pretty common.

Yeah.

So a lot of people are living that worst case scenario in their relationships. So you would do your SWOT analysis,

Question for you. So I think that a lot of people would approach this just like dreading the conversation. 'cause they feel like they're just gonna get battered with more things that they're doing wrong. For men.

Yeah, I get that you might be a little nervous about sitting down and then getting blamed for stuff.

But

the point is that If you don't know what the situation is currently, if you don't agree what the situation is currently, you can't fix it. Let's put a pin in this for today, but we're gonna continue our conversation with Bill in the next episode. So what will you take away from this exchange Here's what stands out for me. First. If you're dealing with this, you're not alone and it's not your fault. We're all facing the same thing. We simply don't have a workable model that guides us through building a company and maintaining a relationship at the same time. Second, Bill's point about the ego hit really landed for me. When our relationship isn't playing out the way we envisioned, we are inclined to blame ourselves. But that's only useful if it leads to you taking responsibility for changing it. So stop beating yourself up just for sport. And the third thing is Bill's insight about playing the same game with two different rule books. You and your partner each showed up with completely different expectations, values, and assumptions about how all this is supposed to work. And nobody told either of you that going in. That's exactly why I do this work. My job is to help you translate each other's rule books and create one together that totally fits your world. That's gonna be your custom passionate partners playbook. Next time we're gonna dig into the whole idea of blame and judgment, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and what to do instead. And I'm gonna share more of the five step relationship operating system with you as well. Seriously, don't miss it. Alright. I hope today's episode got you thinking. But you know, we can only do so much in an open forum like this. If you want to look at your specific situation, book in that free Relationship Reset Call. We'll figure out the next best move and set you on a path to a better relationship for both you and your partner. Again, you can just head over to relationshipresetcall. com and pick a time. You can also join our Passionate Partners Insider Community on Facebook. There's exclusive content and resources there. Or, visit our website or our social channels to learn more about our programs, workshops, and private coaching options. All the links to everything I mentioned plus my personal email are in the show notes. I'll be here whenever you're ready. Now I've got a quick request. I'd really appreciate your help spreading the word about Make More Love. First, if you haven't done it already, hit follow or subscribe on your favorite platform. It helps more people find the show and it also keeps you in the loop. Second, leaving a review would mean the world. It helps us grow our community and reach more people. And finally, if you know someone who is struggling in their relationship, then share the show with them. You might just change their life. Thank you so much for spreading the word. I believe you had good reasons for choosing your partner. My mission is to help you reconnect with those reasons and discover new ways to Make More Love... With Your Wife and In Your Life. I'm Ellen Dorian and that's what I've got for you today.