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

Why are we so reactive in today's day? We're so focused on being busy that we forget to stop and plan. When you get married, you have a divorce plan, whether you know it or not, when you get married, 50% first marriages in America end in divorce within seven years. She's not just a lawyer, she's the attorney people call when everything's on the line. Michelle Mayo Neil is a powerhouse in the world of high stakes family law known for navigating the emotional and legal storms of divorce, custody battles, and complex asset disputes with unmatched clarity and strength. Average length of marriage in the U.S. is seven years. If you make it past seven years, you're beaten the odds, then you might need marriage insurance. Before you get married, you've got to talk about the money part, because if you don't, then you've got a problem from the very beginning of the marriage. She's the founding partner of O'Neil Wisaki and her sharp strategy courtroom presence have made her a trusted voice for clients in the most critical moments of their lives. When others hesitate, Michelle leans in and she's just getting started. A lot of times you'll hear people say that money or finances is one of the biggest downfalls of a marriage. I don't necessarily believe I think that's the result of a lack of communication. All that we have, all that any of us have is time. How we spend our time is really our wealth. Michelle, one of my favorite quotes that you've said, I think it speaks to your work both within family law and divorce court, as well as some of the work that you do with entrepreneurs and business owners that have to deal with these family law situations. I'm negotiating my divorce before I ever got married and I love this quote because it speaks to the importance of being proactive. So I think this is sort of just a small little sample of how you think through life, business, success, complicated situations. When did you first realize how important it was to be proactive in anything in life? Without really knowing that I was learning it, I learned from my father. My father was an entrepreneur. I think what now we would call a serial entrepreneur. He owned a lot of different small businesses. He owned record and tape stores back when we had records, albums and cassette tapes. He went through all of the different versions of music back in the 70s and 80s. He owned an underground utility construction company. Lots of different small businesses, but whenever I was young, he would pose different business issues to me that he was dealing with. At the time, I thought that he actually really wanted my input, and maybe he did, now I know that he was probably educating me, testing me, teaching me how to think, and teaching me how to think strategically. He didn't use the word strategy or strategic thinking, but he was teaching me how to parse information, how to think through a problem, and think not just one move in front of your face, but five moves down the board to analyze the ripple effects of what a decision would be to how it would affect the business and how it would affect the employees or the customers or whatever was going on in the business to the long-range decision, not just the short-range decision. It was really a life lesson for me that he taught me from a very young age, elementary school, junior high, and it was something that both of my parents being entrepreneurs influenced me in decision-making from boyfriend decisions, little girl drama decisions, to we have this problem in our business, and they would encourage me to participate in that decision-making. I think that first of all, your dad's a smart guy for bringing you into the business discussions early on, I appreciate that, but I think that most people, especially in today's age, it seems like everybody's always reactive to everything, and your area of expertise is so diverse, because I'm looking at your resume of family law, which has 175 apolic cases, four Supreme Court arguments. You've been around the block, you've done a couple of things, right? Even in that, you work with a whole bunch of business leaders and entrepreneurs, high net worth, ultra high net worth, because these are the people that are trying to figure out their lives and their relationships, and whether or not it's in relationships or business, I feel like a fair amount of people, not everyone, some people map out moves, but I think a fair amount of people are quite reactive, and they don't think five steps ahead, and I think that that makes life just harder than it has to be, whether or not it's in the business, whether or not it's in your home with your relationships. Why are we so reactive? Why? Because when you say it, everyone's going to think, yeah, for sure, it does make sense to plan the relationship. It does make sense to negotiate. I want to know where that line came from, I negotiated my divorce before I got married. That's obviously a strategic mindset, but why are we so reactive in today's day? You know, I think we're just so busy. I think we are all so busy that we are focused on the next busy thing we're doing. We're reacting to the next thing we're doing. We're so focused on being busy that we forget to stop and plan, and we don't take the time to stop and plan. Whether it's your marriage, whether it's your divorce, whether it's your year, your life, your business, your kids' lives, what do you want for your children, long term, any of those topics. We don't take the time to stop and have what we would technically call a strategic meeting, but we don't have to call it that. We're just so busy reacting to life that we aren't being proactive. I think that my approach at least is that strategy is just a topic we're not talking enough about. When you ask me about negotiating your divorce before you get married, that comes from the concept of planning your premarital agreement. A lot of people think that premarital agreements are just this taboo topic. They are somewhat superstitious about premarital agreements that they are something that are very controversial. My reaction to that is you have life insurance. You have health insurance. You have car insurance. I mean, it's kind of like business insurance. It's kind of like marriage insurance. You hope you don't need it, but you have, when you get married, you have a divorce plan, whether you know it or not, when you get married. That is the law of whatever state if you get divorced. There is a plan for your divorce. Explain that. What do you mean a divorce plan that's the law of the state? There are laws that dictate how your divorce is going to work if you get divorced. All a premarital agreement does is let you control how your divorce is going to work versus how the law tells you your divorce is going to work. It gives you some amount of control over that and you can negotiate that in advance. And if you want to have that kind of control, great. Good for you. If you don't and you want to just let life happen to you, then that's your progative. You can be reactive to it or you can be proactive to it. That's okay. I had a mentor one time that called that ostrich dancing. Do you know what ostrich dancing is? I've never heard that term before. What's ostrich dancing? That's because you're not from Texas. So ostrich dancing is when you stick your head in the sand, you have sand here in Miami. So you stick your head in the sand and you wiggle your rear end and you call it dancing. That's basically ignoring reality. So you can do the ostrich dance and ignore reality. And reality is that in marriage, a first marriage 50% or so of first marriages in America end in divorce. Within seven years. Wow. A second marriage. About 75% of those end in divorce. Is that because people are already used to going through the first one? I mean, it's just the statistics. And is that, is that, are those numbers going up or down? Statistics say now those numbers are going down, but not for the reasons that you think. It's not because somehow people are more committed to marriage. It's actually the opposite. It's because young people now are actually less committed to marriage. They're actually just not getting married. That's not good either. No, no. They're actually just more jaded about marriage and they're shacking up. They're not getting married. Because they've seen what happens with if their parents got divorced or and I'm sure that you see this because you deal with relationships. But I can't imagine at the current environment of social media and I'm sure only fans and all these other, all these other things that make it seem like the grass is greener on the other side. I'm sure none of that helps either. Well, it doesn't help. You know, there, there is a, a movement away from religious beliefs, moral, moral beliefs, those type of things. A lot of the concept of marriage is based in religious beliefs. The young people aren't as committed to religious beliefs, so they don't believe in that. They don't necessarily believe in the longevity of a relationship. So why get married if you're just going to get divorced? You know, so, so if we accept the reality that the unfortunate chances, the statistics are against you and the average length of marriage in the US is seven years. So if you make it past seven years, you're, you're beating the odds. Then, then you might need marriage insurance. And that's where the prenup. And that's where the prenup comes. And so, you know, if you have those, those difficult conversations up front, then, then a divorce lawyer would tell you you're probably going to have, you know, a better chance of success rate in the long run. And, and, and the way I look at it is, you know, you can negotiate that premarital agreement. You can set out the rules that will apply to you. Now, we're not talking about, you know, the kids, I've, you can read plenty of, of, of silly articles about silly things that people put in their premarital agreements about, you know, well, if you gain more than 50 pounds, then, you know, then I get custody of the children or silly things like that. That's not what we're talking about. We're really talking about how to handle property, how to handle, you know, separate property, property we gather together, you know, Alamoni, if you're in a state that has that, those type of things, then we're handling money. That's, that's really what we're talking about. And, and the idea is, let's talk about the money in advance. And then, let's put it in a drawer and move on with our life and hopefully never need it. But if we get to this place where we need it, we've already settled this. And then we hopefully won't need the lawyers and we won't have to fight about it. We will have already had the discussion about how we're going to split up the money, the property, the assets and the debts. You know, I'm curious why people are so hesitant about prenops. I guess it feels like there's not enough faith in the relationship. Is that generally what people say when their partner says, I'd like to do a prenop? I think it, I think it just feels yucky whenever yucky's a lawyer word, right? I think it just feels yucky. Whenever you're in love and you're getting married, I think you've got hearts in your eyes and you're all in your feels or in your emotion. And, and, and, and, and it's real easy to feel like marriage is all about the emotion. And I think people fail in that moment to understand that marriage is not just an emotion, it is a business. That, you know, marriage is great and the feelings are great and yes, it is an emotion and the emotion is very important to a marriage, but marriage is also a business. And the business aspect of the marriage, the partnership aspect of the marriage, it, it cannot be understated. The, the, the partnership aspect, the business aspect, the running the business of the marriage that cannot be understated. And, and that really is something that needs to be dealt with before you get married, you've got to talk about the money part because if you don't and, you know, you, you get married and then all of a sudden after you're married, you figure out that one spouse wants to live in the country and and raise chickens and the other spouse wants to live in a high rise in Miami and build big businesses and, and, and, and eventually own airplanes. I mean, that's two very different lives and two very different monetary aspects, right? Then you've got a problem from the very beginning of the marriage. So those are the type of things you've got to talk about in advance. And, you know, and, and working out that business aspect and working out your primarital agreement, you know, that, that leads to those conversations. I'm curious. You work with a whole bunch of high net worth, ultra high net worth entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs seem to be more strategic than the average individual because if you aren't, I don't think you can be a successful entrepreneur. There's has to be some point where you have to be at least a little bit strategic or your business isn't going to, isn't going to last too long, but unless you're just lucky. But do you find that entrepreneurs put more thought or care, the same amount of care they put into their business into their relationships or is there no correlation at all? You know, I think everybody falls into the trap of, of approaching relationships with their heart and not as much their head. So I, I do wish that everybody would approach relationships a little bit more strategically, but I think across the board, whether it's businesses or, or frankly litigation or relationships, I think, I think strategy is an area that we all could use a little bit more of in our lives. But, but that's my approach to the world, not necessarily everybody else's. I want to talk about how relationships can impact your business. I think it's very important, but just in terms of just touching on this topic, there's a few, a few more questions. What are some of the biggest financial mistakes that you see couples making when they enter into a relationship or I guess marriage? I mean, I think not being on the same page with each other about your financial goals is one of, one of the biggest mistakes. You know, you're always going to have a partner who's a spender, a partner who's a saver, you know, and that's that's somewhat natural. But I think you have to have an agreement on financial goals. You have to have an agreement on where we're headed. And having those marriage meetings, having, you know, the, the, the, the commonality of what, what our goals are, you know, if, you know, if, if we want to save to go on a big trip or we want to save to buy a big house or, you know, what are the goals that we're trying to achieve? You know, do we want our children to be in this private school or do we want a homeschool or, you know, what are those goals and those, all of those type of goals have financial outcomes that you have to plan for? And if you're not on the same page and, you know, one, one spouse, you know, has a very large spending budget and the other spouse thinks we're saving to, you know, achieve some financial goal, then that's going to spell disaster. And a lot of times you'll hear people say that that money or finances is one of the biggest downfalls of a marriage, which I don't necessarily believe. I think that's the, the result of a lack of communication. And the communication is where that needs to start. What's your perspective on, on business partnerships between spouses? Do you think that's a smart idea or not? You know, I think that it can be a beautiful idea. I think that it can turn into a very successful business because who knows you better? You eliminate the issue with trust. Abs, you should. Yes, healthy. If you don't, you've got bigger problems. But yeah, no, I mean, I think that it can make for a very successful, very beautiful business because right, I mean, who knows you better? Who knows your strengths? Who knows your weaknesses? Who knows before you even open your mouth? But you also have to very cleanly define the roles in the business and everybody goes, stay in their lane, right? You've got to, you've got to know who's doing their, this job and who's doing that job. And then you also have to define those roles at home. And so, you know, at, at the office, you know, one person may be in charge, maybe the CEO and the other person may be in charge of some job duties and everybody's got to do their jobs. And if, and if somebody's not doing their jobs, you've got to be able to openly communicate about that without getting all in your fields. And then at home, somebody different may be the CEO at home. And everybody's got to stay in their lane. But through, again, communication is the key to that. It's always about communicating. It's always about communication at the end of the day, business, life, relations, everything you can communicate. So you've had a beautiful marriage yourself. So you had an 18 plus year marriage? We're going on 19. Okay, so obviously you figured out some things that have worked out. You know, all of life is figuring it out, but it's all about communication. It is all about communication. Now, I like understanding a little bit more about your story. And obviously going on 19 years, you, again, figured out something that's worked. You drafted your own prenup, but then you built in an expiration clause. Explain that. What does that mean for somebody who's trying to figure out, just explain that first. Yeah. So, yeah. So I drafted my own premarital agreement. And of course, he had his own lawyer and you didn't represent him. No, I did not. I did not, but I did draft my own premarital agreement. And he had his own lawyer to talk about it with him. But I felt like for us, what was right for us was that after it was a 10 year expression, but after 10 years, I felt like that was long enough for us to know that we'd beaten the odds. And, and that for me, at that point, you know, the concept that what was mine was mine was his and all that, you know, we ought to have been past that so that we were going to have kind of a, everything is ours idea, you know. So, um, and, and, and, and really once we kind of got past that 10 years, we couldn't even remember where the premarital agreement was. Well, that's the thing. Things change so much over a marriage. And I'm curious, that can be good and bad because you can set up a, a pre-nuptial agreement and then fast forward 10, 15, 20 years situations have changed. And it may not be, I think that actually I won't, I won't bring up people into this podcast or aren't part of it. It doesn't matter. I, I know celebrity couples where the pre-nupt that was signed at the beginning wasn't really reflective of the situation that was the reality whatever years later. Right. And, and that, and that can be one of the, one of the problems with the pre-nupt is that, you know, you can have these assets that you're identifying as separate property or, you know, that I exist at the time of the marriage. And then life happens and things kind of roll forward. And then nothing looks the same after a while. And, um, and so either you have to, you have to update it, which then can create stress in the marriage or resentments. Um, or you just have to kind of roll with it and figure it out later, which doesn't really help anything, you know. Um, so yeah, I mean, so for me personally, that's, that's kind of what, what it looked like was that, you know, as things rolled forward, then, you know, nothing looked the same. NetSuite is a success story partner. Now, what does the future hole for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers, full market, bear market, rates will rise, rates will fall. Honestly, I just wish somebody would invent a crystal ball. But until then, over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid dynamic platform with real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. 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Well, I mean, just the reality is everybody has a premarital agreement, whether you know you do or not. Because if you don't have a premarital agreement, you have the existing law of the state that you end up getting divorced. Because the law has some plan for your divorce. You just don't know what the law is. So when you get divorced, the law says how your assets are going to be divided. The problem is that then you can fight over how the law is going to apply to your assets and how the law is going to divide it all. And sometimes the law can be a little complex as to what that means. And are we going to divide this asset or how much is that worth or am I entitled to some reimbursement claims? And different states have different laws as to how that applies. And some states have alimony. We're sitting in Florida. Florida has a hefty alimony clause. Texas does not have alimony hardly very, very small alimony statute that very rarely comes into play. To arguing where you get divorced is actually a part of the strategy. Yes. I get many calls from men who live in Florida who have very hefty alimony obligations that really want to move to Texas and try to get out from under them. And I have to tell them like, I'm sorry, you lived in Florida. When you got divorced, there's no getting out from that, you know. So, you know, that again, maybe is a strategy discussion that maybe we should have had earlier negotiating before you get married. Texas is a pretty good place to live if you have certain situations. That's funny. That's so funny. And then the other thing that you deal with, and I'm sure that you hear a lot, this man is the plan fallacy. Like where women don't think that they have to get a prenup because they just assume that they're, what does that mean exactly? Well, what I tell women is the man can't be the plan. The man ain't the plan. What I tell women is that they need to, you know, have their own strategy for making money and not marry for money because if the average marriage is seven years, then what's going to happen is if you marry for money, the man with the money is eventually going to leave you and marry somebody younger, cuter, sweeter, prettier because us women, we eventually age. We don't get to push a pause button and stay young forever. So, I try to tell women, young women, especially who some of them think that they're just going to be pretty and skinny and fit and find them a wealthy husband that that may not be a very good long-range strategy. So, I encourage the young women to get an education and have a backup plan to that because the man ain't the plan. Also, I mean, I'm assuming that if they just think they're going to get married and get a payout, is that, is it as simple as that? Like, if a woman marries a man and like, you know, a year later, he wants to divorce, he doesn't give her half of everything he's ever made. No, because anything that, I mean, in any state, doesn't matter which state, any of the states, everything that he had before the marriage belonged to him. So, at best, whatever happened during the marriage, she might be entitled to a portion of, but that's it. And, yeah, I mean, you know, there are some women who have had some sort of windfall happen from a short-term marriage, for marrying a wealthy man, but that's rare. So, yeah, that, I mean, that's just not a good plan. Not everyone is going to be a Mackenzie Bezos. Right. Right. And, you know, more often, those wealthy men are going to have very smart lawyers who are going to tell them to get good pre-naps. And so, the lifestyle, while married, may be very good, but whenever, you know, something happens and the marriage goes south, you know, the end result is going to be that unfortunately, the women are going to find themselves with a very different lifestyle after the divorce is over. Tell me a story of one of the more ridiculous cases without naming names or dropping any particulars, just something that would highlight the importance of everything that you're talking about. If you don't do it, this is what could happen. Yeah, I, you know, I've seen cases where, you know, probably the more egregious type of hidden asset cases are the, you know, super high net worth cases where there are offshore assets because they're, you know, now the government is getting smarter, but there are ways to hide assets offshore where, where it is difficult to trace. And what I tell especially women who are like, I know he's hiding assets. Well, if he's hiding them from the tax return and the IRS, I have no greater power than the IRS, you know, I am not a better sleuth than the IRS. So, you know, if he's not reporting it on his taxes, I'm probably not going to be able to find it either, you know. So, you know, unless you've got a lot of resources to pay me to, you know, go to, you know, licked in stone or the Bahamas or something like that to go and poke around, I mean, I'm not going to be able to find it either, you know, back, back 10, 20 years ago, there were some things you could do on the internet to find assets, but, you know, since 9-11, a lot of those got shut down. So, now it's harder to, with all the technology we have, it's harder to find hidden assets in 2020. That sounds backwards. Yeah, it is harder. It actually is. There used to be a little bit more sleuthing you could do on the internet before, but with a lot of the internet security now that it is actually harder to find things. Yeah, I mean, you know, public records are more available now, but you can't find, you know, a lot of personal information that isn't actually public record. So, yeah, so it's a little bit harder now. It makes sense. And tell me, so, so if you, if you end up leaving somebody before the entrepreneurs, if they are co-owners in a business, are there things that they should be thinking about in regards to their business, because wouldn't their spouse get part of a business, and now they're sitting on the cap table of a business? If they, if the business is owned before the marriage, generally, no. But a lot of times what we see is, for example, if the business is owned before the marriage, then there's a marriage. And then maybe there's some change in tax law. And, and the CPA says, because of this change in tax law, I recommend that you change your entity structure from this type of entity to this type of entity. Okay. And they change the entity type during the marriage. So this could be if you go from like an LLC to a, to a C Corp, something like that. Okay. That changes the characterization from the separate property to community property. So then all of a sudden it's partly hers. That's wild. Uh-huh. And, and I, I mean, literally, I see this all the time. And the CPA doesn't understand marital property law. And the CPA has now basically created a situation where the wife that has an entitlement to the business that the guy started 20 years ago. And then now his partners are now partners with the wife. She has shares in the business. She can vote. Right. Right. And so, you know, what I, what I wish at that point was that somebody had called me along the way and said, Hey, Michelle, what do you think of this? Talk to me about some of the things that, um, people don't do well in terms of strategizing around their business, their growth. Um, give me a rundown of when somebody comes to you and you start to look, you know, behind the, the veil and you start to see all the things that are going on. Um, what are some things that you wish more of your clients, more of your entrepreneurial clients would pay attention to? Yeah, you know, I think just just the first thing that comes to mind is that is that people tend to just be reactive, you know, in any time that you're in business, you're always moving fast. I mean, at least you hope you are because you have a lot of business and, you know, you're hopefully being successful or trying to be successful and you're moving very fast and you're being reactive. And that just creates a situation where you're not able to be, you know, planning or proactive. Yeah. And so, you know, what, what I encourage people to do is just take that breath and think five moves ahead, you know, I call it fifth move thinking, you know, think about, take that breath and I call it practice the pause and I tell that to my lawyers, I tell it to my clients who are emotional in their divorces, I tell it to my business owners, you know, just take a breath, practice the pause, you know, don't react out of emotion, practice the pause, get your thoughts about you and react out of logic. And then the fifth move thinking, you know, the next move, right, and then think about the ripple effect, think about what the counter attack is going to be and then think about what the long range effect is going to be and then think about are we going to win the war, not the battle, right? What's the ultimate goal not winning the battle? And so that's a that's a litigation strategy, that's a boardroom strategy, that's a living room strategy, you know, what's your ultimate goal, not what's the the short term goal? And so that, like in my mind, I call that, that the fifth move strategy. I love it. I was going to say, I think that I think that most people think they're more strategic than they actually are because the second you get an email that pisses you off, you're like immediate, I got to fix this right now, you know, you get an employee that screwed something up, you get anything that happens, it happens all the time and you just jump into the solution and that serves nobody. And I think our I think our cell phones have made that problem, I don't want to say worse, worse than the right word, I think our cell phones have made us more reactive because we can get an email at nine o'clock at night that can piss us off. And I know as a lawyer that happens to me, I can get an email back from a lawyer on the other side of the case and it can piss me off at nine o'clock at night and man my thumbs start working, right? You got to be careful. And I have to remind myself, you know, put the thumb down, walk away, practice the pause, think about the strategic response, not the reactive response, you know. The strategy applies to everything, there's not a single thing you do in business that you cannot pause and reflect on and think five moves ahead. Some of the things that I'm curious that I think entrepreneurs just from my personal experience miss the most. I think they're not strategic about where they where they want to build their business, what kind of exit they want to have, what kind of milestones revenue milestones, how big they want to build this thing. I think that they are not strategic about financial structure legal and exit. I think that they just jump into sales and marketing and everything else is like, well, I'll figure it out eventually. So do you see, do you feel that more or less? Yeah, I think I think in general it's that they don't know what their goal is. They don't know what their target is. They don't know what they don't know where they're going. If you don't know where you're going, how do you know when you get there? And right, you just jump into sales or marketing. We could always debate whether sales or marketing is more important. But whether sales or marketing is more important, what I would tell you is that knowing your goal and having a strategy of how to get there is more important. And right, I mean, I think when entrepreneurs are in the thick of it, they're just being reactive instead of having a plan. And having a plan for the marketing, having a plan for the strategy, and having, I mean, you can call it the exit plan. Maybe it's not an exit. I mean, maybe it's a lifestyle. Maybe you pass on to your kids. Right, right. I mean, maybe their end goal is, right now, maybe their target is having enough money to buy a plane. So they don't have to sit next to some kid with a cold. That sounds actually amazing. I know, right? Yeah, that does sound amazing. I get it. When you think about setting sort of like your North Star as an entrepreneur, or even just like a North Star in life, because there's so many similarities between all the lessons for entrepreneurship, all the lessons for relationship, all the lessons for like health goals and wellness goals, they're all kind of the same. If there's not that much difference, there really aren't. I mean, you know, that's, it's all relationships, right? I mean, business, I mean, we can say business is different than marriage. I mean, but it's okay. I mean, maybe, but really, it's all about building relationships. Yeah. And, you know, nurturing those relationships. I mean, it's, you know, whether it's business to business or are personal to personal, you know, it's really all about, you know, building the relationship and having the trust. And, and there's just, there's not that much difference. And, and you mentioned the health goals. I mean, you know, another one of the lessons, you know, that I teach whether it's my entrepreneur clients, whether it's my, my divorce clients or whether it's the young lawyers that I mentor, you know, another one of the, the lessons that I teach is, you know, set your big goal and then focus on the small stuff. And the example that I use about that is I've never been an athlete in my whole life, ever. But there was this point in life where I decided that I was going to be an athlete, made a decision, I am going to change my life and I'm going to be an athlete. And I set a goal for myself to run a half marathon. And, you know, you don't run a half marathon by taking a big leap from the start line to the finish line. It's not one giant leap, right? So, so, right. So, so it's a whole bunch of small steps. And some of those steps, you, you get your runners high and you're like, they're easy and you feel like you're running on the wind. And then you get to about mile seven and it's painful. It hurts, you know, and the the marathon, half marathon I did was on dirt. And it was dusty and you feel like you've got like sand in your mouth. And then I got to mile 10 and I quit. I was, there was a bench. I sat down and I was like, I quit. Like, I hurt my feet hurt. I'm tired. It's hot. It was Texas. Like, it sounds like a miserable day. I was miserable. I was thirsty. I was hungry. There was, I'm like, what in the world was I thinking? Like, I was, I'm not an athlete. I don't know what I was like, there was nothing about this that was fun. And I quit. And then along came my coach. She was behind me and she said, well, what are you doing? What are you doing sitting down? I quit. And she's like, well, okay. But you know your car is up there by the finish line. So you're eventually going to have Uber is not going to pick you up down here. You can't call an Uber. You're going to have to eventually get up. She's like, so all you got to do is get up and all you got to do right this minute is put one foot in front and then another foot in front like. And so, you know, so I eventually got up and put one foot in front of the other and took one small step and then another small step and eventually got to the finish line. And I wasn't last, you know. And so, you know, you don't, you don't accomplish the big goal in one leap. You accomplish it in small steps and those small steps like some of them are painful and some of them are great and some of them are numb, you know. But, but they're all small steps and they don't feel good and, you know, they're all different steps. But that's the thing. So you have your North Star, you have your end goal. You have your strategy to get there because you can't have a strategy if you don't have your end goal. It's impossible because you don't even know where you're heading. And then you take all those different versions of steps. I love that analogy, but that's my point. It's the same in business, the same in a relationship, the same in the fitness goals, it's the same in anything. That's right. Right. Some of the steps in the relationship are not going to be fun. That's right. Marriage is not all like it's not all hearts in your eyes that are all popping out like, you know, tiny moon phase. Yeah, it's not after a period of time. No, I mean, a marriage is the same thing as that marathon. Like, there's going to be times in your marriage that you're going to sit down and say, I quit. Like, I am done with you. I am sick of you. I am sick of your shit. Like, I am sick. Like, I'm done. I don't want to hear one more word out of you. You know, but then you, you get up and you put one foot in front of the other. You communicate. You talk about it. You remember why you're together. You remember your goals. You remember you got kids like whatever it is. And you keep going forward, you know, and same thing about your business. I mean, it's all about relationships. I just want to take a second and thank Cornbread Ham for supporting today's episode. Now, Cornbread Ham CBD gummies have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit. I don't use them every day, just when I want to win wine after those extra busy weeks, but they're perfect for those moments when you want to take the edge off and just find your balance, really just shut off from work. Now, what makes them special is how Cornbread Ham crafts them. They only use a flower of USDA organic hand plants. That's the best part for the purest, most potent experience. 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Each show is under 30 minutes. iDigress helps eliminate complexity, complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies to achieve true, scalable and sustainable success. If you're an entrepreneur building anything, you need to listen to iDigress. This is one of the most useful business podcasts. Trust me, go do yourself a favor and listen to iDigress wherever you get your podcasts. How do you choose that North Star? How do you choose that goal? How do you know if it's a right goal? Because I think people always want to set goals, but it's like a buzz word and people don't even... You can say, I have a goal. I want to make money. That's why I started a business. I want to be married to a beautiful woman. That's why I want to get married. I want to have a family and be with somebody who I love. I want to build a business and I want to achieve so many million dollars in revenue. But I don't think those are concrete enough goals. I think those are just... Their goals that someone else has told us that we should go after, but they're not even our own personal goals. And I think that not enough people do enough self-work to figure out what their own goals are. So before the strategy, we already agreed that you have to figure out that goal or that North Star that you're heading towards, what's your advice for somebody to figure out what their true personal goals are in anything, business, life, marriage, whatever. I think you have to do a lot of introspection and a lot of work on yourself to know what it is that you ultimately want, right? Because that's not... You can't set a goal based on what your parents told you that you wanted or based on what society tells you you want. Your goal may be that you want to have a farm with 50 dogs. That may be your goal. And that's a perfectly okay goal. Are your goal may be that you want to have a high-rise penthouse in Miami with a personal... With a private jet, like... And that's a perfectly acceptable goal too, but you have to look inside yourself and know what your personal things are, what's important to you. And only you can decide that for you. For you, it may be having a situation where you can have the freedom and flexibility to have your kids homeschooled. Or it may be that you want to have the flexibility to travel internationally to world school your children. Different... Everybody has the things that are important to them and they're going to look different for everybody. So you have to be emotionally astute enough to look introspectively to know what's important to you and not be setting those goals based on what everybody else thinks is important. And those goals can change, you know, based on different times in your life. You know, right now the goal may be this one thing, you know, when you're young, hopefully it's to travel and see the world and be exposed to a lot of different things because you're young and you can. But then, you know, when you get to be 50 or 60, maybe the goals are different, you know. And so those goals can change over time. You know, my advice to anybody is, you know, set big goals, big goals. Like don't, don't play small with your life. Even I think I have played too small with my life. You know, I look, oh yeah, I look back at my life and I think, you know, man, I should have set goals that were way bigger for myself. Even as much as I know that I have achieved. Your career, you're not done yet. I know. I know. I know I'm not done. I'm setting big goals for myself right now. But, you know, but I still, I look back and I think, you know, I still could have played bigger. And I, you know, so even whenever I'm mentor young, young women lawyers, you know, I try to encourage them that if their goal isn't punching them in the stomach, then it's not big enough. If it's not scaring you to like, if when you set that goal, if you're not absolutely in the bathroom vomiting on yourself, like it is not a big enough goal. What's your advice for somebody whose goals keep expanding and maybe their business partner or the romantic partner? They're not expanding with you. How do you navigate that? I would say that the answer is a little bit different depending on business partner versus romantic partner. And, you know, business partners are a lot easier to kind of move in and out of. Sure. I've always thought that a business partner is like a marriage. You know, I've heard that saying before and I feel like it is. I don't know. You know, at least for me, I think business partners are made out of, out of earthly relationships. My personal viewpoint is marriage partners are maybe a little bit more spiritual. So, to me, in my belief system, I think business partners are a little bit easier to divorce. Marriage partners, I think for me at least in my belief system are a little bit more of a long term thing that are that involve maybe God a little bit more. Yeah, of course, yeah. So, you know, so I think that the romantic partner may be a little bit more of a complex question. Okay, but still in both cases, how do you bring them along for the ride? Or when do you know when you can no longer bring them along for the ride? And under the assumption that you're going to be putting a lot more work into the marriage than into a bad business partner. That's fine. I mean, I think it comes back to communication. I think when you've outgrown a business partner, you just communicate about it and say, you know, I think we're moving into different directions. And, you know, I've been called to go this other direction. And, you know, I think that we're just going to two places. 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, you know, 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, you know, life balance is kind of like a stock portfolio, you know, 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. You know, 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. And so, you know, 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. I mean, now, are there going to be sometimes where you've got, you know, 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, you know, the kids' choir concert that takes priority or the Tuesday night, date night, that's priority. And you've just got to put your boundaries up around that, you know. And that deserves every bit of the same importance as the big deadline at work. And you've just got to treat it that way. And if you don't treat it that way, then eventually that relationship will fail or the relationship with your children will fail. You know, if you don't put boundaries around what is it that's important to your child, you know, their, their soccer game, you know, 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. And if you don't, then that relationship will fail. And, you know, and that's just, that's how it has to be. And it has to be the buckets, you know. And it just has to be a priority for you. And, you know, all that we have, all that any of us have is time. You know, we can, we can say that we have money. Money is just the barometer that we, you know, that we place here on earth with the importance. But what we really have is time. And, and we, you know, how we spend our time is really our wealth. You know, that's how our children judge our wealth. That's how our spouse's judge our wealth is based on our time. So, you know, we all are given the same amount of time. That's the, that's the great equalization is our time. So, you know, the, the guy that owns Netflix, you know, the homeless guy on the corner, you know, we all, that's the great equalization. You know, 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, like, we all are the same with the same 24 hours. And, and that's the equalizing factor. So, um, you know, so it's how you spend that time in your day. So, so equalize that. And that's how, that's how you to say what's important to you. And so, it's such good advice. I think that this is why I like when people take risk early on in their, in their life, when they're young, because then they can afford to, they can, they can afford to not have as much balance. They can say, well, 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. And 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. And people, people, 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. And those are painful years. They're very, very painful years. So, I think you're just being cognizant of where your priorities lie, where your time, everything you just said is so, so important. You know, I think that I think that a lot of people spend a lot more time, you know, in the in the catch. They spend so much time and energy trying to catch it than to keep it. Why is that? Why is that? Yeah. Do you know? You have an idea? I think the chase is more fun. Once you've got it, you know, it's not as much fun to try to keep it. That's one of the most important. And that, right, that's, I mean, that is when it's more important, but but it's also not as much of a challenge or as much fun, but I think that's also maybe societal, you know, maybe we don't place as much importance or, you know, as much prioritization on the keeping. I think we should, I think that, I think that, you know, maybe there's a little bit of moral and ethical decay in society. I mean, you see it, you see the numbers and the data. I don't think it's healthy. And I think that outside, you know, 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, you know, parts of the world they push back against is sort of 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 we can go out and socialize and, you know, being restaurants and everything still, but we are lonelier than we've ever been. And 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 emphasize that point, that somehow we are missing something about how to actually connect with each other. And, 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. Well, I think about just in my life, like, when I get stressed out having like a, I mean, Gina's an incredible, you know, better half to me and whenever I get stressed out, she's always the one who helps me realize that the problem is, isn't as big of a problem as it really is. And she helps me sort of take my mind off of work. And she forces me to shut off sometimes. And I can only imagine, because I overthink everything, I always, I overthink everything. And if I didn't have that person and I've got her in my life, I would probably be less effective. I would probably be like this, you know, this anxiety, stressed out mess. So she's amazing. But I think that if I had somebody in my life who was not as amazing and was arguing, gas lighting, whatever the bad behavior is, obviously performance will go way down. I wouldn't be able to function either because then your home is just full of trauma. So yeah, to your point, like, it can be a blessing or a curse, it can be the best thing in the world for helping your success or it can destroy your entire business if you're not careful. That's why picking the right person is so, so, so key. It's really, really key. When you think about sort of financial structures, so for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are building a business, they're making some money, say they're making more money than their spouse. I'm assuming that it's not like usually a 50-50 where both people are making the same amount. One person making a lot more money than the other person, what are some good financial best practices? Should they have a joint bank account? Should they not? Like what are you and they're in the marriage? They're not planning on divorcing yet, hopefully never. But what are just some best things that have worked really well for people that maybe don't divorce? So I think my recommendation is that that you always have joint funds. I think that's good for a marriage to always have the joint funds. I think that when the couples that I've seen that have everything separated, I think that just creates a mindset of separateness that isn't good for the the the togetherness. So I always recommend that you that you have joint funds. But I also always recommend that each spouse have their own account that you can call it a fun money or whatever you want to call it. But their own fun money account that they can kind of have to spend on themselves. That they can do their own thing with that they have their own right to spend on. For women, whenever I counsel with my women clients, I call it their their dress money account or whatever. If they want to go buy a new dress, they can go buy a new dress without asking permission. And you could call it golf fund or something for the man or whatever. But I think that it's important to have both. So to have the account that is the marriage account that you have marriage meetings about that you that you jointly decide. This is this is the budget. This is how much housing we're going to spend on. This is whatever. And then we each have our discretionary spending account. And you might even have more accounts than that. Maybe you have your travel account. We're going to put this much money aside for travel. Maybe you have the kids private school account. We're going to have this much for private schooling. And in the budgeting, there's a book called Profit First I think is the name of the book. And that's kind of applied to a business sense. But you can apply that to a marriage, you know, where you have different buckets for different things. And apply that to the marriage. But I think the most important thing is that you have a bucket that is the bucket or multiple buckets that we decide together how we're going to spend. But I think it's important that each spouse has kind of their own little bucket that they themselves by themselves can decide how they're going to spend their bucket. And I think that even though they have their own buckets and they have all these different accounts, the goal is to have conversations about all the financial goals and how much money is going to go where. And I'm assuming the best practice is always full transparency. Always. Yeah. And even even in, you know, when things aren't going well in business, I'm assuming that you also advocate for you're telling your spouse right away. Always. Yes. Okay. I figured I figured you don't because, you know, we always talk about, okay, what if there's something that's bad in the marriage, you should address it right away. But I feel like there's an entrepreneur who's not succeeding in business. There's a little bit of shame. So I feel like they would maybe hide that from their spouse if they're nervous about saying because they don't want to seem like a failure, right? So say the business isn't going as well or there's a lawsuit or whatever. Million different bad things can happen in business. When you don't tell your spouse that, I can only imagine that that's never a good outcome. Well, it's never a good outcome. But if you don't trust your spouse with that, you know, with that downturn, I mean, that's the exact place that you should be able to trust your spouse, you know, with that, you know, things are going badly and your spouse should be that safe harbor for you. Now, if you're getting sued at your business because you slept with your secretary and you're getting sued for, you know, sexual harassment at the office, that's a whole different set of problems. It's a big set of problems. It's a big O set of problems and you're going to have problems at home and at work. However, you know, assuming that it's a downturn in business because the economy's terrible and there's some tariffs coming up. I've got several clients, you know, that are having some downturns in business because tariffs and, you know, they import their their source materials and things like that, you know, that that should be where your safe harbor is, you know, that, that, you know, we're going to go through some tough times and we need to figure this out and, you know, conserve our resources and things like that, that should be your safe harbor. And that should be the place that you get that consolation, but you shouldn't feel the shame at your home. I mean, if you've got a good relationship. What happens if you want to take more risk and you haven't always been a risk taker? Say to people are married and they're both working W-29-5, somebody wants to go start a business. How do you, how do you manage that conversation with your spouse? You know, that happens pretty often. I have no doubt that happens and then the spouse is like, what are you talking about? Especially where you have one that wants to be more of a risk taker and the other is wanting to not be a risk taker, yeah. And that can be, you know, that can be difficult and that's, you know, that's one place where, you know, one spouse just has to take the lead in the marriage and say, you know, I want to make this decision for us. And if it, you know, if it goes badly, I'll take the blame for it, you know. And that's a place where you want to have, you know, your safety net, your financial safety net. We've got this nest egg, but, you know, I want to go forward with this idea. A lot of times that happens where a spouse wants to leave a paycheck job and go and be an entrepreneur. And that's, you know, that's risk and sometimes you've just got to go do it and you've got to trust each other. Yeah. And I think that the last sort of thought about entrepreneurship, money, relationships, what do you do with your kids? How do you set your kids up? Is there things that you should know about setting them up for success, trust, funds? I don't know, I don't have kids yet. That's something I've got to figure out. So I'm asking you for me, like if if I'm making money in my career and I'm happily married, we spoke about pre-naps, spoke about setting up the structure before we sort of say I do. But what about, you know, the family planning, the legacy planning component of it? Because you don't want kids to suffer because of a divorce. And I think the kids do suffer because of divorces. So what are the things that people should know? You know, I think that kids are resilient and they take the cues from the parents. I've seen kids that suffer from divorce. I've also seen kids that have resilience and do just fine. I think that they always are going to take their cues from the parents, the parents who fight and put their kids in the middle of their divorce. You know, they're the ones that are going to suffer. The kids whose parents say, you know, we can disagree as spouses, but we are still going to be co-parents. You know, those kids do just fine. They adjust and they keep going. You know, I've had clients who get divorced and live down the street from each other. I actually had had one set of folks who bought the house where the back alleys backed up to each other. So the kids could just go from gate to gate. And they shared custody and didn't fight over it. And the kids just went where they wanted to go. And they shared custody and it was just fine. You know, so the divorce itself is not the determining factor. People who understand that that ex spouse is still family. You know, those children and those children's family is still your family. You're going to be a family unit forever. And you're going to raise those children together. You know, those children's family is still your family. So the divorce does not have to be a reundition for your children. Is there financial safeguards? You should try and negotiate ahead of time for the kids or no. You know, I mean, there's the reality is that whoever, you're always going to be financially responsible for your children. You know, oh no, I meant, yeah, that was not that was not the question. You'll always be financially responsible. I meant in the pre-nut phases or things that you should say, hey, regardless of what happens or the division of assets, X amount should be allocated towards the children. Sure. I mean, you can set up in your premarital agreement. You can always set up trusts in advance for the children. If you have the financial means to do that in advance, always, always, always, always set up trusts for the children 529s. If you can, you know, I would always do that first because, you know, that pre-planning for the children is never going to go to waste. And, you know, pre-funding, college tuition, pre-funding, you know, anything that you can into trust for the children is always going to be better so that they're taking care of. So Michelle, you've gone through so much and I appreciate everything you've taught the audience. I want to give them the opportunity to connect with you to follow you to sort of consume more of yourself. I know that you're going to be putting it a lot more content, maybe doing more of your own podcast, who knows? Like, obviously, I'm very bullish on podcasts. I hope that you put out some more of your own episodes. But where can people go and connect with you if they want to learn more about what you're working on? Yeah, the best place is social media at the Michelle O'Neill on any social media platform. I'm mostly on Instagram, but on all the social medias, that's where you can find me. Amazing. And I always like to ask this last question. You've given a lot over to the audience, but say you had to take your years of wisdom and you had still all the things that you've learned down to one thing. And the lens is, you have to pass this one bit and piece of information on to your kids. What would that one lesson be? That one life lesson? Why is it so important? And what would you pass on to your children? I think the one life lesson that I would pass on to my children is the same lesson that my dad passed on to me, hopefully a little more artfully than how he passed it on to me. But that is to you know, just to think five moves ahead all the time and not be reactive to life, you know, to implement to implement death move thinking and think five moves ahead on the chess board, play chess not checkers.