Lessons - The Real Reason 50% of Marriages Fail and How to Beat the Odds | Michelle May O'Neil - Relationship & Wealth Expert

In this lessons episode, discover why balancing relationships and business success starts with prioritization. Learn how treating family commitments with the same weight as work deadlines preserves connection. Learn why time is the ultimate measure of wealth and learn how setting boundaries creates harmony between ambition and intimacy. I always laugh when people say they can't balance a relationship with their business. When you have somebody who built one of the biggest companies in the world who did it just fine and who's still happily married and speaks about the importance of his wife and his relationship and his success. So that's one strategy. Always be dating, always setting time aside. What are some other ideas as you grow as a person, as your goals grow, as you change? Assuming you're not changing for the worse, you're changing for the better. What do you see works in terms of keeping couples together as you go through this sort of journey? Yeah, look, it's all about prioritization. I mean, that's the bottom line. It's all about prioritization and life balance is such a topic right now for people, especially women. How do you balance it all? How do you have life balance? And life balance is kind of like a stock portfolio. When you're at work, be 100% at work, when you're at home, be 100% at home, and you just have to put life in buckets. In your stock portfolio, you're not going to have all 100% high-risk stocks. You're going to have some of this and some of that and some of this and some of that. That's how your life should be. You can't be at work 100% of every day. You're not going to be there 24-7. Are there going to be some times where you've got some big board meeting coming up or some big M&A thing or some big something where you've got to be there and you've got to be 100% there and it's going to take a lot of your time. Yes. Then you're going to have the thing at home or the kids' choir concert that takes priority or the Tuesday night, date night, that's priority. You've just got to put your boundaries up around that. That deserves every bit of the same importance as the big deadline at work. You've just got to treat it that way. If you don't treat it that way, then eventually that relationship will fail or the relationship with your children will fail. If you don't put boundaries around what is it that's important to your child, their soccer game, whatever that thing is, you've got to put the same importance and the same boundaries around that thing as you do around that very important thing at work. If you don't, then that relationship will fail. That's how it has to be. It has to be the buckets. It just has to be a priority for you. All that any of us have is time. We can say that we have money. Money is just the barometer that we place here on earth with the importance, but what we really have is time. How we spend our time is really our wealth. That's how our children judge our wealth. That's how our spouses judge our wealth is based on our time. We all are given the same amount of time. That's the great equalization is our time. The guy that owns Netflix, the homeless guy on the corner, that's the great equalization. We all have the same amount of wealth because we have the same amount of time. Beyonce has the same 24 hours in the day as you do as I do. We all are the same with the same 24 hours. That's the equalizing factor. It's how you spend that time in your day. Equalize that. That's how you say what's important to you. That's such good advice. I think that this is why I like when people take risk early on in their life when they're young because they can afford to not have as much balance. They can say, I'm not dating. I'm not married yet. I don't have kids. I can put 95% of myself into my business or my career. But the issue is when that mindset doesn't just exist for a season of your life, but it exists in perpetuity. That's when you get in the trouble and that's when people end up going to see you because they've maintained this imbalance for 30 years. The sad thing about divorce and relationships that break is most people put so much energy and effort into trying to fix it for years before it ends up getting to the point where it's actually divorced. Those are painful years. They're very, very painful years. I think that just being cognizant of where your priorities lie, where your time, everything you just said is so, so important. I think that a lot of people spend a lot more time in the catch. They spend so much time trying to catch it than in to keep it. Why is that? Do you have an idea? I think the chase is more fun. Once you've got it, it's not as much fun to try to keep it. That's one of the most important. That's, I mean, that is when it's more important, but it's also not as much of a challenge or as much fun, but I think that's also maybe societal. Maybe we don't place as much importance or as much prioritization on the keep in. I think we should. I think that maybe there's a little bit of moral and ethical decay and society. I mean, you see the numbers and the data. I don't think it's healthy. And I think that outside, you can make an argument about why people get married or don't get married, but I think that by people not getting married and by not having families, I don't think that people are more fulfilled being single. I think that there's a lot of anxiety and depression about dating, about finances, about cost of living, about what is my life going to look like. So I don't, you know, people push back against religion and people are more secular and people sort of in some parts of the world that push back against this or the nuclear family. But I don't see the mental health of people that push back against that being any better at all. Well, about a year ago, the surgeon general came out with a study that said that that post pandemic that we are, we are the loneliest in America that we have ever been. That's sad. Post pandemic. Like coming out, like we are, we are not in the pandemic anymore. Now we're lonelier. And we are lonelier than we have ever been. And, and, and we can go out and socialize and, you know, being restaurants and everything still, but we are lonelier than we've ever been. And we, because we don't somehow, we are missing connection even after we can go out and, and we connect with each other. And, and to me, that, that study that came out really kind of emphasized that point that somehow we are missing something about how to actually connect with each other. And that, that says so much just about friendships, about marriages, about, you know, like we said, businesses or relationships. I mean, just, just about how to just connect. I want to, I want to ask a couple more questions about entrepreneurship, money, relationships, because I think you have a front row view to a lot of this because you work in all these, you're like the perfect blend of person that deals with all this stuff at the same time. So I, I'm curious if you see, and the entrepreneurs you work with, are they more successful when they're with a spouse or a partner, or are they more successful when they're single? Do you find there's any, there's any trend between those two? I think it just depends on the quality of the relationship. You know, if you're in a relationship that is bringing you down, then I don't think that that suits your success in the business world. I think that if you're in a relationship that is uplifting you, and, and good for you as a foundation, then that helps you rise, you know, in your business. So, you know, to me, it just so depends. I think that if your relationship at home is, is bringing you down, then you might be better off without that. You know, your business world might be better off if you didn't have that bringing you down. So I see a lot of my business clients, you know, they may be more successful after their divorce because they're not having this weight, bring them down at home, that's then keeping them kind of weighted down at work. And then post divorce, they, they then are kind of set for, for rising after, after they get divorced. You know, and then I have other of my business clients after they get divorced, they may have, you know, a new, a new marriage that is very good for them and sets them up to rise, have one client in mind, who got remarried after his divorce. And the new marriage just is, is, got wind in his sale. And he's just risen incredibly in his new marriage and has, has been very successful in his business after his new marriage. Thanks for tuning in. 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