Brian records an episode in Florence, Italy, in his triumphant return to this podcast. Topics covered include how you can balance your work/home life while working from home, and what boundaries you might need to have in place to make your family life a success!
Life transitions like getting married or having a child have a massive impact on your living situation, and being prepared for those changes is key to a happy life.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to run a home studio like an adult
- Why you need to have boundaries in your life
- How unspoken expectations can be detrimental to your home
- What EIA! Means for you
- How traffic cones could save you from lots of frustration
- Why you need to be gutsy and have tough conversations
- How being consistent with your yesses and nos will improve your life greatly
- What your gas tank is
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Quotes
“You have to continually evolve. But I think the most important thing . . . You have to get the marriage part right first.” – Chris Graham
“If you’re not willing to put maintenance into your marriage, maintenance in your relationship, and work towards an actual result… It’s like people that drive 30,000 miles without changing their oil.” – Brian Hood
Episode Links
Websites
456 Recordings – www.456recordings.com
Chris Graham – www.chrisgrahammastering.com
Courses
The Profitable Producer Course – theprofitableproducer.com
The Home Studio Startup Course – www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/10k
Facebook Community
6FHS Facebook Community – http://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/community
@chris_graham – https://www.instagram.com/chris_graham/
@brianh00d – https://www.instagram.com/brianh00d/
YouTube Channels
The Six Figure Home Studio – https://www.youtube.com/thesixfigurehomestudio
Send Us Your Feedback!
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Related Podcast Episodes
Episode 10: Keep Clients From Ruining Your Life Using These 7 Boundaries – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/keep-clients-from-ruining-your-life-using-these-7-boundaries/
Books
Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerich – https://www.amazon.com/Love-Respect-Desires-Desperately-Needs/dp/1591451876/
The six figure home studio podcast. Episode 73
Welcome back to another
start at the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my amazing cohost who has managed to keep the ship afloat while I've been on my honeymoon. Chris, Amazing Superman grant. How are you doing today, Chris? I miss you so much, dude. I miss being on this podcast so much,
so let's catch everybody up. You got married?
I did. I got married March 2nd
you bought a one way ticket to Europe. You guys have been doing all the things. Tell us about that.
Yeah, so we got married March 2nd and we are still currently on her honeymoon right now. We bought a one way ticket to Paris. Actually right now we are in Florence, Italy, so the romance of Italy and we've been to Paris, we've been to Barcelona, we've been too nice in southern France, Monaco, Genoa, Italy to the hillsides of Tuscany for like a, a little romantic weekend thing. We're in Florence right now and I think it will be in Rome next week. So, uh, I am recording from the hotel room. I'm currently lying in my bed on my back with my laptop on my lap recording into an sm 58. Here's where we're going to get the gears to let alert here recording into an sm 58 into my zoom, h n five and r h five. Sorry, zoom h five. And if my audio sucks, I apologize. But you know what? This is the only thing I could travel with. I didn't wanna bring a whole [inaudible] my interface and everything. That'd been overkill. But man, this has been a fun trip and I'm extremely happy to be back on the podcast though cause I've missed it.
It's been super cool to watch your guys' Instagram stories and just to see like you guys are having so much fun traveling. And I keep thinking as I watch all these Instagram stories, what a perfect example of why you should have business skills because it's your business skills that have allowed you guys to have such an amazing, extravagant beginning to your marriage as you're building that foundation of a relationship between you and your wife.
I tend to agree there are certain perks to getting married later in life. If I'm 32 now, if I would have been married at 22 this is not what we would have gotten. Like we've gotten to like Pensacola, Florida are destined for it or something on the beach for the weekend or something because I was broke at 21 or 22
oh same
well what do we have on the books today, Chris? What are we gonna talk about today? This first episode back, there's a lot of pressure, man. I've been gone for a couple of weeks. As far as the podcast, I've been gone for, actually, it's almost been a month now since I got married. We had a couple of episodes in the bank and now we're finally back on the grid. But I only missed two weeks. Right? Two weeks.
Two episodes. Yeah, that's true.
Cool. So we'll be talking about today Chris.
Well I think it would be fun to kind of explore a conversation about life transitions. Um, you are now married and your life is going to look a lot different now. Your priorities have totally changed and it's really complicated when you're trying to run a home studio. When you're trying to run a business and you have a life change, like getting married, getting engaged, having a kid, having another kid, having yet another kid and there's all sorts of stuff that's weird about how your priorities shift. But as your priority shift, you also have to be more disciplined to figure out how to not waste time. You know, this whole Pareto, his principal and Parkinson's law that we talk about, the 80 20 principle spread, those principal and Parkinson's law is this idea that however much time you have to do something is as much time as it's going to take. If you've got a day to finish a project, you'll finish it in a day. If you've got 10 days, you're going to finish it in 10 days. This idea that work expands to the time that you have available and for you now as a married man and you know, hopefully someday for you as you know, a father of 17
oh my God, no,
there's a lot of transition that happens there and I know for a lot of us in our little six figure home studio, podcast community, there is a lot of us that have kids. There's a lot of us that are engaged. There's a lot of us that just got married. There's a lot of us that just got a dog. You know, there's, there's just a lot of life stages. So I think it'd be really great to explore. This is something that you guys have asked us for over and over and over that we haven't done yet, but just to do an episode on this sort of stuff, what it's like having kids and running a home studio, what it's like with that sort of transition into marriage, you know, kind of the whole nine yards of how do you adult and continue to run a home studio business.
Yeah, I think this is one of those episodes that is another, like we've had so many of these episodes and there's so many yet to come when we're just like, why haven't we done this episode yet? But when you think about running a home studio, it's a home business and when you work out of your home, that means there is no escape from the things that are happening at your home. And so while there was a lot of positive that comes with working at home where your commute to work as 15 steps from your bedroom to your officer to your living room or to your studio and you can be home to see your kids grow up and you can be home to take a nap if you want to. There's also a lot of negatives that come with this where you know if you have gotten in a fight with your wife, which you know, I'm sure I'll have a fight one day, side note there.
We've probably had a fight already but like you know like you can't get away from that. It's going to stay in the home and you're going to be working within all of this or when you have kids now you have all of these things that are potentially interrupting you or so there's a lot of things that you have to figure out, ways to work around, especially once you've had kids. And I think it's really gonna be the focus is most of this conversation is going to be around when you have kids. Really, how do you keep a home studio and again, I don't know all the answers so this is going to be Chris sharing his wisdom with me as I'm transitioning into married life and then potentially a life of having kids in the next couple of years. What that will change in my business at home and the things that Chris has learned along the way of having three kids and being married. How long have you been married now Chris?
Going on 13 years.
Gosh, so I think there's a lot for you to share with me with the audience and then I can definitely pick your brain on stuff because I am a naturally curious person and I'll ask a lot of personal questions.
Totally. Well the thing about having kids and doing the home studio thing is there are layers to this. Being married and working from home is a whole thing unto itself. It's a unique, massive transition from the single life. Having that first kid as a whole nother transition, having that second kid is one of the transition and you have to continually evolve. But I think the most important thing is if you're married with kids, you have to get the marriage part right first.
Well, let's start there because I just got married and this is, you said this comes in layers. So let's start with that first layer of like you're married a, you're now living together like she is. She'll be nesting in my home when we get back from our honeymoon. And this is going to change a lot of things because I've never lived with another woman before in my life. I've had male roommates and I've lived alone for most of my life, but I've never lived with another woman. So like I've got to discover how that's gonna work in my life and my business and my personal life. How that's going to transition into the recording studio in the six figure home studio and the podcast. And this is something that you, obviously you've already dealt with in your life. So what was some of the things that you saw whenever you finally got married and moved in together with your wife, how this affected your business?
There's a book that my wife and I read when we were engaged called love and respect and I didn't love the book as a whole, but I love the concept of the book and the concept of the book was a little bit generalist. But the basic idea was that a wife thirsts for love to be expressed and a husband thirsts for respect to be expressed. And I don't think this sort of idea holds up a hundred percent of the time. I was a really skeptical the first time I heard that, but much to my chagrin that has played out a lot in our marriage where my wife will be unhappy if she feels unloved and I'll be unhappy if I feel disrespected. And I know like there's this initial inclination of like you sound like a really conservative d bag man. Like that sounds really, we are like some southern misogynistic horse shit. Right? And so I don't say this from a massage earnest point, but just from a, like men are different than women and women are different than men. So one of the ways that's played out for my wife and I is we have struggled with boundaries with working at home,
which by the way, go back to episode number 10 where are we talking about keep clients for mooning your life from using these seven boundaries. We talked about the banners with your clients, but now we're talking about the brunches with your wife, right? Is that what you're kind of going into here?
Right. And this is a two street. This is not about like Brian, you need to go home and erect walls to protect your business. Like the most important thing is to protect your marriage, in my opinion. If you build a successful business, but you wreck your marriage and the process, who freaking cares not worth it. And so the big thing that we've struggled with, my wife and I is I would be home working and then she would pop her head in and be like, Hey, good, I'm you do this for me real quick. And there would sorta be this idea of like, well you're here, you're available. And that would be a problem for me because I would immediately feel like I'm trying to provide don't you? Oh, I feel disrespected and hall and it's so weird when you get married that your identity is so much more tied to your spouse like the next morning, like you wake up after being married [inaudible] those sorts of things that might not seem like a really big deal when you're dating suddenly just get a lot more personal.
One of the things that's been so important for us is to have really clear boundaries and one of those boundaries that we have is if I'm in the studio, nobody knocks on the door that if you want me, you text me. You pretend that I'm actually not at the house and that sounds intense, but I want you to imagine, you know, if you're like a single guy working from home or a single girl working by herself, I want you to imagine adding two cats, three kids and a spouse to that like it. It's complicated. It's really complicated. And in order to keep things running smoothly and in order to maintain flow state as an artist, as a whatever type of engineer you are, you have to have these sort of really clearly defined boundaries. And I think the biggest issue that you'll have, Brian being married is unspoken expectations. Either you will have an unspoken expectation of Megan or she'll have an unspoken expectation of you and then you're not going to meet her unspoken expectations or she's not going to meet yours. And that's typically where the stupidest fight start. And so I think it's really important to communicate, hey, when I'm working, make sure you text me before you come and get me. Like don't knock on the door.
I feel like this is going to be not a huge issue for us as far as like putting boundaries in place because we actually both have hours. We have to work and we have things that we have to get done. We have our own deliverables for own businesses and so we put, we put need each other to leave each other alone for large chunks of time. But I will say like from what I've gathered in my short marriage, like this is a conversation that has to happen. It's not like, oh I heard on the podcast that Chris said that he has these boundaries in place. So I'm going to go tell my wife from now on, you don't knock on my door working. Like I feel like that's a recipe for like a huge, huge argument and the potential for your to hate our podcast.
Well I think it's a good conversation to start with like, Hey, I'm working at home. You are working at home. Let's talk about ways I can serve you to make this as awesome for you as possible. And vice versa. Let's figure out some really simple ideas that can help simplify this. Because when you get married or have kids or whatever it happens to be, your life gets more complicated and your success gets harder as your life gets more complicated. So mostly this is about simplification. So one of the things that's tricky as well is you now have a mother and father in law and Megan now has a mother and father in law. And you guys are having the advantage of being like old and wise now that you're married as opposed to Alison and I were both very young and very stupid and it gets tricky in the exact same way where your wife might have a type of relationship she was used to with their parents that now might be a little weird with you two living together or vice versa.
And I think this whole expectations idea really applies to the inlaws thing as well. Well, all the things we're talking about are going to contribute to your work because if your life gets hectic, if your life gets stressful, your work's gonna go downhill. So getting this sort of stuff ironed out early is really, really helpful. So one of the things that we do, we call it AI and eos stands. It stands for expectations in advance. And this idea that you communicate, hey, I have this expectation that you guys would maybe show up on Christmas Day for dinner, um, at this time. And it's like October that I'm communicating this expectation. Uh, so this, I see where you're going with this. So basically that way if there's any misalignment and what the two of your expectations where you can sort it out now as opposed to right up to the minute, and this sounds so stupid, but it's Kinda the same deal when we're like trying to figure out where we want to eat.
If we wait last minute until we're like in hanger mode, while we're under a honeymoon, we're like bickering with each other because like we just are so hungry, we can't make the decision and we're like, we'll fight over where we're going to eat. Whereas if we just talk about it ahead of time, super easy, we just like, oh, that sounds great, let's do it, book it done, throw it in laws into the mix and then it gets infinitely more complicated. So I can imagine expectations in advance. Ai Is a good rule all across the board. Copyright, Chris Analysis and gram 20 1718 oh 17 got it. So what I'm trying to do here for us as an audience and for you Brian, is 80 20 confrontation in your relationships and the 80 20 I think most confrontation is related to expectations that weren't communicated, let alone that weren't communicated in advance.
This is just as relevant once you have your first kid, once you and your spouse have a kid, there's different expectations, there's different norms that both of you have that if they're not communicated it can cause some problems. So kinda case in point, like going back to pre kids for Alison and I, I used to be a touring musician and I was out, where was I? I think I was in New York City and it was February 13th well actually I was in New Jersey, I was outside in New York City. It's February 13th first year of marriage. We'd gotten married like two months before. By the way, this is the day before Valentine's Day if I'm doing my math correctly, correct? Yes. It's the day before Valentine's Day. I think. You can see where this is going. And I'm out in New Jersey and this giant blizzard just obliterates all of Pennsylvania. So I'm in New York, I'm trying to get to Columbus, Ohio.
That's basically a nonstop drive across route 70 in Pennsylvania and I'm thinking, well crap, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I'm a newlywed. I probably should go home. And I had a Subaru, I love Subarus. They're sponsoring our podcast now. They gave me a free car and so I had a Subaru all wheel drive monster of a station wagon and I was like, you know what? Screw it, I'm going. So it was like eight inches of snow on the highway. Unplowed but a Subaru that's not a big deal. Eight inches of snow is like no snow. But it was like me and trucks, I was the only car on the road total like pedal to the metal, made it all the way home got, they're totally like crashed and fell asleep right when they got home. And my wife and I got in this big fight the next morning because she had an expectation that she was going to like wake up to flowers and chocolates and all the things and my expectation was I like drove through a dangerous blizzard to be here.
I didn't have any time and her expectations weren't communicating in advance but neither were mine. And we got in a big fight about that. The same thing starts to happen when there's a kid in the mix and there's the expectation like what happens for most first time parents is you come home with the baby and the husband's like, uh, I don't know how this works. And in the baby wakes up and in the middle of the night and the mom starts nursing and the dad just sort of sits there because he's not really sure what the expectation is. Like what is a dad do when a baby wakes up at three 30 in the morning and once fed and you just like want to be there and be supportive. But because everyone is so tired and no one's communicating expectations in advance, what happens almost all the time is the husband wakes up every time the wife wakes up to nurse the baby and as a result eventually husband and wife are completely sleep deprived with a newborn and that it's a recipe for disaster.
Yes, it's a very, very, very bad thing. If a good conversation had happened, if like, hey, you know, wife to husband, like my expectation is that you wake up and feed the baby from this time to this time or you're on duty from this time to that time, you know, in the morning or whatever it happens to be like there's no one size fits all to this. The only thing that needs to happen every time his expectations are communicated in advance. That solves so many problems and eventually as we work our way back to the home studio, you communicating expectations of hey, my studios in the basement and our toddler has taken to running laps upstairs. My expectation is that when I'm downstairs that would be like TV and movie time or Ipad time or you guys are on a walk or something, you know like where it's not like Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google.
Well let's pause here real quick actually because I don't think we fully explained to your scenario right now. And not everyone knows from our past episodes. What's your home life is right now. So tell everyone, kind of like what your setup is like at home, where it is in your home, what ages are your kids like what is the scenario you live out every single day right now?
Gotcha. So I am a mastering engineer and that is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, I never have clients over ever. It's been like seven years since the client's been to my house, so I don't have to do the attended session work, which makes things a lot easier. But I'm married and I have three kids. Ages are eight, six and three. Did I get that right? Yeah. Eight, six and three boy, boy, girl. And we're lucky in that we've got this huge giant basement with tall ceilings and I've got a great mastering setup in here. The only thing it doesn't have that I regret is the ceiling is not floated from the floor above me. So if I close the doors, I really can't hear anything in the rest of the house and less the kids are running in a certain part of the house, then it sucks.
Then it's really, really rough. So I have to communicate with my wife, I'm like, Hey, I'm going down to work on this record. I need you guys to just not stomp. So like no shoes and no sprinting. One of the things that we've done that's really helped with that are we have, I'm sure you guys have seen like those little yellow traffic cones that like you'll put on your driveway. So like we literally have traffic cones and like our kids are sort of trained at this point so that they're not as important as they used to be. But if I was working I would get the cones and I'd set them out and it would be tiptoe time. And the kids would tiptoe and it was a complete nonissue like that system by itself fixed 99% of any frustration I had working at home.
That's a genius idea. I love that. Just like small little thing. Creating a little tip toes zone with yellow cones in your house. If you have a basement studio and your kids are known to stomp around, that's brilliant.
Super huge. One of the other things that I think is tricky for most of our audience is that for most of us were probably not mastering for most us it's production work. It's mixing work. There's probably somebody coming over to record sometimes.
I was going to ask about that. What was your family? Think about you having clients in the studio because I know not everyone has the luxury of getting their clients online, doing all the work at home with no clients ever interacting in person like a lot of people would be very uncomfortable with three kids and a wife to ever have clients coming over to their personal residence. What do you say to that?
You guys are not going to like this, but my thought is if you need to have clients over, then you should get an office at a certain point. Once you have kids. Having clients over to the house is really challenging. That's going to put a lot of stress on your relationship with your spouse. If you're like me, you're going to be an asshole because you're stressed. You're going to have patients issues first and foremost. Think are there small leverage points are they're small little things you can do, like the cones I mentioned before that are going to solve most of the problem and again you're looking at the stress of running a home studio with a family and you need to figure out where 80% of the stress is coming from and solve that first. Usually you're going to be like, oh, 80% of my stress is the kid is running around in a circle above my head.
If I can fix that, then all of a sudden everything gets a lot easier, so I would approach it like that. But what you eventually we'll probably find if you're doing client work at your house, is that finding a small, cheap space that's close to you? I think you might be surprised at how affordable that can be in most parts of the country. If you're in like New York or Los Angeles or something, yeah, that's going to be really expensive, but for most people, like you got to think about Hitsville. We talk about Mo town all the time. It's a garage, it's a house with a garage on it. You might have a lot more success converting the garage or getting there. A bunch of companies now, I've been trying to land that his sponsors for awhile, but there are a bunch of companies who specialize in creating tiny homes, so they build basically a really, really nice modern shed in your backyard.
If you own a house or even if you don't, these are movable in most cases where you can have something in your backyard. It's three to 500 square feet and most of the time if you do that, you can still have a home studio, but your local municipality, wherever you happen to live has different laws for small structures that are not attached to the ground. So if you have one of these, studio sheds is one of the companies that makes pretty cool stuff. If you get a studio shed that's below a certain number of square feet, you don't need a building permit, nor do you have to pay more property tax for a quote unquote improvement to your land. That's huge. It's super interesting and I really think that a lot of people moving forward as this home studio business thing explodes, that a lot of people are going to have some sort of standalone smaller
facility in their backyard that accomplishes what they're looking for. From my perspective, I've seen, I just got married. I don't have kids so I can't speak to this from personal experience, but I have the unique perspective of seeing thousands of people's experiences online by running the sixth year on the studio and just from the friends that I have around Nashville and I've seen people make this work. I've seen people, uh, that are still, they have two or more kids. They still work from home. They still have clients coming into their home to record. But every single one of them that I know have their home separate from their studio even at home, whether it is a segmented part of their house where you can't access the actual home from the studio or whether it's a separate building behind the home or it's a basement that's completely blocked off from the upstairs. One of those things are usually the case if you have kids. And I think that's the only way I would still have clients coming home to my studio if I had kids. I don't think that I would feel comfortable bringing bands into my house with kids simply because like a lot of bad guys that I've worked with are potty mouth. They're weird. Potty mouth
at best case scenario, they're a potty mouth a lot of times you know they're going to be even more weird or issues with that. And a lot of times like the guys that are trying to make records are younger, they don't have kids. And to be like in a building with children can be very uncomfortable for them.
Yeah. It can kill the vibe.
Yeah. It can kill the vibe. And I love what you're saying about segmenting the house. If you are in a situation like we are, we have a walk out basement. So if I were having clients over, there's plenty of room here. If I were doing production to build, you know, a floated floor, you know, floated, stealing the whole like room within a room thing and put a bathroom in the basement and have clients walk round the back and come in the basement a long time ago. That is what we did. You know, when I was kind of still in production mode, and I think this is again back to the 80 20 principle. If you're in a situation where the only thing keeping you from segmenting off part of your house is a bathroom, then build a bathroom. If the only thing that's keeping you from segmenting off a part of your house for your business is a door, then build the door.
So there's a lot of things that you can think about where the solution might not be, oh my gosh, we need to spend $2,000 a month on rent and then we have to build out this facility and I don't own the building that it's in. So if we ever lose our lease, oh my gosh, we'll lose everything. You don't have to make that jump. It might be as simple as putting a another door so that the side of your house can be sectioned off from the other side, especially if it's just like an external grade door. So one of the things that I would recommend is thinking about your studio as if it's an Airbnb, could you completely shut it off and rented out? And if that's the case, your life is going to get a lot easier as far as keeping the two things separate. And you also have a fall back plan, which is if the studio of businesses and doing so hot, you can put that section in your house on Airbnb and make a little cash on the side.
I can tell you from experience my studio that I had downtown or I still have, I live in it now, but I moved out of it for a couple of years because I was only doing mixing work and I could actually make more money from the building as an airbnb than I could as a studio. So I was double dipping. I was making the airbnb money and I was doing mixing work and it was amazing. So it's definitely something to consider because airbnb is completely passive. While the studio was completely active work and something to consider. One of the things that comes to mind as you're talking about all this stuff. By the way, Chris is the expectations and advanced thing. Again, I know a lot of people, they hesitate to have clients over simply because they haven't communicated expectations with the wife or the spouse because they just assume that they wouldn't be okay with it and they haven't actually talked about it.
Or even worse is they have clients over all the time and they've never had the conversation with their spouse of whether or not this is something they should continue to do to do or that she or he even feels comfortable with. So I think, again, this is just one of those conversations that you have to have to, to find out what the expectations are for each other and then try to find a solution to the hesitations that they might have. Because like you said, it may not be some extremely expensive thing where you have to build out this separate commercial space with separate rent and a renovation costs. It could be that they just want a separate secure door between the home and the studio. And that's all they need to feel safe or maybe a security system or some cameras there. It could be a very simple solution that costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
Right? And so everything we're talking about I hundred percent agree with absolutely everything you're saying. Everything you're talking about comes down to two things, communication and creativity. Are you creative enough to find a way to make it work without taking on a bunch of extra stupid liability? Liability, meaning each month you owe somebody money as a result of the decisions you've made. And then the communication piece is this idea of having the guts to sit down and have a hard conversation with your partner. Let me be a little rough with you guys. Let me give you guys some tough love.
Me Too. Or is it just them?
Everybody, but I'm not nervous about this for you at all. This is, you can shut your ears off for a minute while I say this because this is not for you. If you struggle with the courage to sit down and have a tough conversation with your partner, I have not great optimism about your success in business. You have to get this right first. You have to have the type of relationship where you can sit down and say, Hey, I've been a little uncomfortable with this. Is there a way we could make this easier on me? Or, Hey, it seems like you've been a little uncomfortable with this. How can I make this easier on you? If you're not willing to have those conversations with your significant other, stop listening to this podcast and go start listening to like marriage podcast instead because that's your biggest issue. That's the thing that you need to fix because that's what's going to do in your business in the long run because you have to be supported by the person that you are married to to really make this work over any period of time. And I could be wrong here, there could be some exceptions to this rule, but I am not smart enough to conceive of a world where expectations in advance and real communication is not the foundation of the life that you're building.
I have a couple of takeaways from what you just said. The first one is that one of the things you talked about when you're asking how you can make things better for your spouse is you are not being selfish. You're actually trying to find out a way to make it better for them so you're making it about them. And I think that's super important when it comes to problem solving is not just saying, hey, how can you make this better for me? That to me is like a very selfish way to do this sort of stuff and I'm guilty of doing that myself. I'm not saying I'm impervious to this, but anyways. The second thing I noticed is if you're unwilling to have these sorts of hard conversations with your spouse, you're probably not having these sorts of hard conversations with your clients and you're probably not setting expectations with your clients and all of this stuff is interconnected.
Like if you can have a good healthy marriage, you can probably have a good healthy business that you enjoy instead of just letting life happen to you through your marriage and just letting whatever currents in the world take you down certain ways in your marriage and in your business. That's where you wake up one day and you're like, where the fuck? If I've been going my whole life, I hate this, or wherever I've been going in my business my whole life, I woke up and I hate doing this now. I've been guilty of this in my past with my business stuff where it's like I woke up and I just, I hated doing certain things. And so it sometimes takes a lot of intention and a lot of hard conversations and a lot of hard thinking and introspective thinking where you're looking at yourself through a critical eye in order to get to where you're trying to go. And that sounds Kinda dumb and I guess kind of hippy ish, but I still think in my head at least that sounds right.
I love that. And so let's crank the awkward in this up just a little bit. Oh, I love what you do. This Chris, I'm not addressing you and your wife here, but one of the best areas to begin this conversation is in the bedroom. Ooh, girl talked to me. So if you have a relationship with your spouse where you're not comfortable saying, hey, I like this, I don't so much like that. And your spouse isn't comfortable saying, Hey, I like this. Hey, I like that. And we're talking about six here. Y'All s e x. S. E. X. If you're not comfortable with those parts of the conversation, that might be a good place to start because getting in a place where you are comfortable knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that your spouse feels unconditionally loved by you, that's a great place to start. The benefits to communication are substantial in the bed.
They are quite substantial and so no matter what your position in life, this is always a great place to start because true communication and true love. I think unconditional love is that you can be in a position and say, hey, I don't really like this, whether that's in the bedroom or somewhere else and if you have a good relationship, you can present that in a way where your spouse is like, oh, okay. I didn't know that without getting offended. Yes. What's tricky and especially for like young couples is that if you communicate that poorly and as audio engineers were like the worst in the world at this, I'm like, absolutely. I don't know, really lucky when I wake up in the morning and uh, you left the bathroom door open. Like if you just communicate like a jerk like that, it's not going to go well.
But if you do it in a compassionate way and, and especially if you make it about them, hey, I'm kind of feeling like maybe you don't like when I leave the bathroom door open, is that like, is that a problem for you? Oh, you hate that. Okay. And your house, the bathroom door was never left open and mine, we always left it open so that you never wondered if he were walking in on somebody in the bathroom. Oh, okay. Got You. All right. We're on the same page and I've just noticed just communicating those sorts of things with my wife so far, just on our honeymoon, because when you're traveling together on a honeymoon for this long, like you're going to get on each other's nerves, it is inevitable at some point and a lot of times it's just from you start having those conversations and realized it.
Each of you had different perspectives on the same exact thing that causes friction. And once you talked it out, having an open conversation like that, it cleared the entire thing up and that was no longer a friction point. That's awesome. Well, let me transition is, let's talk about the kids thing. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of this for everybody. This is definitely for you, Brian, for the future. I've had a lot of people will reach out mostly through Instagram. Chris underscore, Graham, g. R. A. H. A. M. It tends to be the place I have the most conversations with people that listen to the podcast and I've had a lot of people reach out and ask questions about like, Dude, how do you dad? Yeah, we actually had an email about this that I got right before this episode. We started talking that has spurred this whole episode.
Yeah, I can't find the email on my phone, but if you emailed me recently and it was probably you. So yeah, the idea here is how do you home studio business and dad at the same time or mom at the same time? And here's my best advice on this. You first and foremost have to have a good marriage. And then after that you have to be good parents. And then after that, the figuring out the business balance thing, like all of that kind of falls into place pretty easily on its own. And the reason for that is that a lot of the skills that you need to build a good business are the exact same skills that you need to be a good parent, which is mind blowing to me. But it makes so much sense. Yeah. Well let me explain our perspective. And this is not something that I made it for this podcast.
This is literally the base code of my wife and I's parenting style. We made up something that we call Carr c a. R. Do you have like little dumb names for everything you do, Chris? Oh yeah. Heck yeah. But this is good stuff. So car is consistency, agreement, reward. When you are parenting, first and foremost, you have to be consistent. And I say this as a weird dude who remembers like my oldest memories are nine months old. That's really strange. It isn't a hundred percent bullshit. I thought that I verified it with my parents. I like walked them through this happened and this happened and then you said this and then they said, this is embarrassing stuff. I was describing to them and they're like, yeah, that's exactly what happened so I'm weird and that I remember with crystal clarity what it's like to be a small child.
It seems like it was yesterday for me and as a result I remember what it feels like to try to win as a kid and the most frustrating thing as a kid is when you think you've left something on the table when you think you could have one but you didn't or when you think off, I just keep pushing. Eventually they're know will turn into a yes. Let me say that again. The most frustrating thing for a kid is when you have an adult who you think you can change their no into a yes and it's just a matter of saying the right thing or trying hard enough. As you can imagine, a child who believes this is a complete pain in the ass. There are really difficult to be around because they're frustrated, they're exhausted and they're just trying to turn your no into a yes.
Now the reason that a kid tries to turn your no into a yes is because they think they can and the reason they think they can is because they have already in the past. What you're saying is if you can stay vigilant through your entire life and never one time turn a no into a yes or a yes into a no, then are you just trying to tell me that it makes parenting easier because they won't argue with you as much. So much easier. And so not to get religious on you guys again, we've been doing a lot of Bible quotes lately. Sorry for that. I used to be an atheist so I can relate with the, you don't have to apologize with it. You can have a bible quote and then move on. Okay. Well, but I think it's worth mentioning. When I was an atheist, anybody would say anything remotely religious and my skin would just crawl.
So if that's you, sorry. But there's wisdom here and that's why I'm sharing it. There's this verse where Jesus says, I forget what it is, but he says, let your yes be yes and your no be no. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. So when I talk about consistency, agreement, reward, this idea of car consistency simplified is let your yes be yes and your no be no. And if at any point you're yes becomes no because you're weak because you didn't want to have the fight. May God have mercy on your soul. You are going to live that fight again and again and again and again for the remainder of that child's life. It will never stop because they will constantly believe well, they said no, but it's just a matter of saying the right thing enough times and then eventually they'll say, yes, I'll wear them out.
Can I say something real quick please? Dude, this Bible verse does not just apply to kids. This is all across the board. If you are constantly taken advantage of from people around you, you're likely not living this out correctly. You are letting knows turned into yeses. If just people say the certain things to you, you're changing your mind. Okay. I guess I'll do it across the board. This will make your life better. If you can simply make your yeses and your nos no and not change your mind because someone tried to persuade you to go back on something you said or to do something that you said you wouldn't do or to cross a boundary you said you wouldn't cross or to try something. You said you wouldn't try or to give something you said you wouldn't give up. Like these are all recipes for going down a path. You don't want to go down and this is how a lot of people end up in places in their life they never wanted to be simply because they didn't let their yes be yes and their no be no
totally. This is really powerful stuff. Like I said, this is the base code of my marriage. This is how we roll every day. We talk about this several times a week at least. So consistency is the first thing a child is going to attack. A child has no power and that sucks. It's really uncomfortable to be a child with no power. Consistency is the first thing that a child is going to attack. They are going to want it to find a way to convince you to turn your nose into yeses and if you have the strength to buckle down and always let your yes be yes and your no be no, it's going to be so much easier for you. So fun fact, this is some Ninja parenting tactic right here. If you do that enough, your child will trust you that your yes is yes and your no is no.
That by itself is going to make your relationship a lot better. The next thing you can do when they're struggling with whether to believe you or not is look your kid in the eye when you've said, hey, if you do that again, no dessert for a week. Set an expectation in advance. If you do this, this will happen. And then get down on their level and look them in their eyes and ask them this question, do you believe me? I'm telling you man, this is powerful. But if you use this move and then you fold after using this move, oh my gosh, have fun dude. Like you're screwed. But when you ask them, do you believe me? It makes the child pause to say, hmm, do I believe them? Yes or no? And if they say yes, it's probably going to work. They're probably not going to do it again. And if they do, you've got to do whatever the punishment is and you've got to do it immediately. And to the t, because this is about building trust because the thing that makes kids the worst in my opinion is when they don't trust the adult, it's exhausting for them.
I've seen this in so many lives. I see the parent threatened the child in some way, shape or form the child still go through with it and then nothing happens. That's the kid
being trained to never believed the parent to never trust what they say. And to know that they can get away with anything that ever happens. Totally. So imagine that you parented in a let your yes be yes and your no be no versus if you parented and uh, your yeses flexible, your no is flexible. Try bringing clients to your house to record a record in both of those scenarios. Oh God. Now I see where this is going back to the home studio thing. This is so true. Unbelievable. And let's say you pour your heart and soul out making a record, your kids at the babysitter's or preschool or whatever it happens to be, they come home and now you are recovering from work in an environment where the child believes that your no is flexible. It's going to cause performance issues for you the next day because you're going to be exhausted.
That is the definition of dysfunction is a child who doesn't trust their parents. And the reason they don't trust their parent is because the no was flexible. And so I know this all sounds a little bit intense, but let's start to get back to car consistency agreement. Reward consistency is making sure that the child trusts that your yes is yes and your nose. No agreement is the ideas. The next thing the kid's going to do is going to ask me, hey, can I have this entire candy bar for dessert? No. Hey Mom, can I have this entire candy bar for dessert agreement? Is the idea that you and your partner need to be on the same page that your yes is there, yes that your no is there no. This is less important than consistency, but if you don't get this right, it's the child trying to separate you from your spouse and that is really, really toxic and it's gonna create some problems.
I'm not going to go super into this cause I think this is sort of self evident. We all remember being a kid and that move of like, oh dad said I couldn't borrow the car. I wonder what mom will say, we all remember this, but reward is really, really, really important. Reward is this idea. If you simplify every single thing that humans know about psychology down to one sentence, that sentence is you get what you reward for. It makes sense. You get what you reward for. So if you're in the grocery store with Jr and jr says, Hey, I want that box of chocolate cookies, and you say no, and junior starts to throw a hissy fit and screams and cries and totally flips out, and then you give them the box of chocolate cookies you just lost. You have just rewarded junior for throwing a hissy fit. Ooh. So what junior has learned is, hey, if I do this, I get what I want. You will get what you reward for. So you have to constantly be thinking, do I want to reward this behavior? That makes sense. Yes. This is huge, man. We should launch a marriage podcast and just let you talk the whole time. I don't,
we'll call it [inaudible] pro
Newburn pro. That's hilarious. Well, yeah, our marriage is anything but perfect. Anything but perfect.
No one's is though.
We totally still fight all the time and I get super pissed and she gets super pissed all the time, but when you have at least a few ground rules that are etched in stone, like consistency, agreement, reward. When it comes to parenting like Eei, when it comes to everything else, expectations in advance. When you do these two things, it simplifies your life enough where you can do this super complicated thing that is run a home studio for a living and once you have these sort of main things down, that is absolutely not just the 80% of the stress. It's probably more like 98% of the stress that you are going to struggle with and then you can start to have some consistency in your work life to know that I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do work, it's going to go well and then I'm going to finish and then I'm going to go hang out with my family.
That's kind of the message of this whole episode is like if you were trying to work anywhere even outside of your home and you have just a train wreck of a home life, it's infinitely more difficult to have a successful business. And when your life at home is toxic and your kids are running the house and you can't agree with your spouse on anything and the kids are stomping around and if you try to work from home in your home studio would that same environment, it's infinitely more difficult. So I think just this foundation of a healthy marriage, a healthy home life, having a good healthy relationship with your children and your spouse and the three of you together are all unified. I think this is really the recipe for having a successful business that you're running from your home. And I think without that, I can't imagine trying to have a marriage that I'm keeping together a business that I'm running and trying to have multiple kids in the equation. I can't imagine how complicated that can get, especially if you don't have these sort of, I hate to just like simplify it in the 80 20 principle way, but without having these little things in place that we talked about like I think it's so much more difficult without that. So I really appreciate picking your brain on these topics because I've definitely been taking a lot away from this as a newlywed.
That's awesome man. Well that makes me happy and feel all warm and glowy and fuzzy inside. Well, I think this is really cool for you guys. If you guys haven't thought about this stuff for two reasons. One, you have a gas tank,
gear acquisition syndrome.
No, a gas tank is in like your emotional fortitude, your energy to do good work, your ability to make decisions when your gas tank is empty, you're a loser. All of us are. We're irritable, we're not patient. We make unwise decisions. It's like when I'm hangry. Yeah, like when you're hangry, you have a gas tank and running a good business is about having a full gas tank as much as possible. So you would make the best decisions as possible. As a mastering engineer, that is the number one skill that I have worked on. Polishing is the ability know in my gas tank is full and then to go in and make the right decision for a client the first time. That's one of the only reasons my business runs so well is because they almost never get revision requests because I make the right decision in the moment.
The client loves it and then there's not this back and forth after the fact 95% of the time. So you have a gas tank and the important thing to remember is that work drains your gas tank most of the time, but your gas tank can also be drained by your family life and these two things both drain that tank of gas and you have to make sure that your gas tank is at least you know, half full. I have a 1998 jeep wrangler. It's one of my favorite things in the entire world. It's cool looking. It's old, there's a little bit of rust on it. Can we gear sluts for cars or no? No, you cannot gear such with the gene. But here's the thing about this old ass cheap. If I have less than a quarter tank of gas in that jeep, which is tricky to find out cause the gas gauge doesn't work super well.
It runs much rougher with a quarter tank of gas and then it does with a full tank of gas. So it's easier to drive. It shifts better at accelerates faster with a full tank of gas than it does with a quarter tank of gas. We are the same. We are that old jeep that runs better on a full tank of gas. So if I want to really push my jeep and I want high performance, I'm going to drive a long distance or I'm gonna offer rode with it. It works a lot better to do that with a full tank of gas. And the same way that you having a full tank of gas when you work on your business instead of for it or when you're working for your dream client, you want to make sure your tank is full and you want to avoid getting below a quarter tank cause then you start to run a little bit rough.
So how do you keep your tank full, Chris? You've got to constantly be working on your ability to know where your tank is at. I think people that struggle with this have no gas gauge and they're like work, work, work, work were empty, die and that's it. And then they make terrible decisions. Once the gas tank hits empty or once it hits a quarter tank full. You have to have the ability as a parent, as a spouse, and as a business owner to know where your gas tanks at and to decide when to stop according to that. It's not about your ability to run a marathon, it's about your ability to run a sprint. Your ability to run a sprint is based on your ability to know that your tank is full and how that's going to affect you and what you can do to refill your tank.
And I think if you stick with the car analogy, a car that's been tuned up, a car that's been taking care of is going to get a lot better gas mileage than a rundown piece of shit car that's never been worked on. It had no maintenance on it. And if you take that back to what we talked about today, if there's anything I learned from all my conversations with people that have been married for a long time, that if given me their advice is that marriage is hard work and it's only compounded when you have children, the work becomes even harder. And if you're not willing to put in maintenance into your marriage maintenance in a relationship and work towards an actual result, it's like people that go like 30,000 miles about changing their oil. If that's the kind of relationship you run in your household, you're going to have much, much harder time keeping that gas tank.
Hey guys, one more thing, some big news for you. If you have been listening to this podcast for a while and struggling to put some of the advice buffet that we
put out there into action in your life, you might be a good candidate for one on one business coaching. I just started offering one on one business coaching about a month ago and it has been super fun. My big thing is bring freedom. That's my overall life mission. Anything that I do that's the impact I want to see from it. The one on one business coaching has been a ton of fun for me because it's helped me bring freedom to the people that I've been working one on one with to help them build the business that will fit in their life as opposed to having to build a business that their life than has to fit into. If you're thinking about business coaching, if it's something that sounds even remotely interesting, I would love to hear from you. Yes. You can apply at Chris Graham, mastering.com/coaching there's a little application you can fill out there, and if it looks like there's a chance that we might be a good fit, we will schedule a free phone call. I'll get to know you and I'll tell you if I think the coaching is a good investment for you, so check it out, Chris Green, mastering.com/coaching I would love to hear from you. Thanks guys. Stay tuned for another episode. Next Tuesday. Have a great day.