When Home Stress Bleeds into Work: Divorce’s Impact on Entrepreneurs

Free Agent Podcast with Meg Schmitz – Guest: Karen Covey, Divorce Coach, Author, and Host of the Off the Fence Podcast

Meg:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to or welcome back to the Free Agent podcast. My name is Meg Schmitz. Here in this podcast of discussion is all about free agency and taking control over your financial future. The mission of my show was to share inspiring conversations with real people who took the leap into self-employment, business ownership, franchising, sometimes, and freedom from corporate refugees and executives tired of the desk job to entrepreneurs and investors looking to share a camaraderie and inspiration through their own business journey. My podcast aims to spotlight on real people who stepped into the unknown to control over their future and became their own boss.

And so when I said welcome to or welcome back to the Free Agent podcast, I want to welcome back to the Free Agent podcast, Karen Covey, who is my favorite divorce advisor. Brilliant. I love your podcast. And so I can’t wait to dive into how your guests and your learnings will help my audience of business owners get off the fence.

Karen:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be back and excited for our conversation.

Meg:
So, as I was saying earlier, my producer for this podcast and actually the brains behind anything that you would see online regarding Meg Schmitz and my brand, her name is Tamara. She said, you know, you just interviewed that guy, Ted Santos, and it was so impactful. What he was saying, you really need to have Karen back on to talk about the impact of business owners being on the fence about either a real divorce or a divorce of a business partner. Sometimes it’s your spouse and sometimes it’s not, it’s someone else. But she found that particular interview with Ted to be eye-opening regarding what must be a huge financial impact, but also morale, culture, when you’ve got a business leader who’s indecisive about their future.

So that’s really what I wanted to talk about today. And if you’ve got any immediate stories that come to mind, let’s just dive in.

Karen:
And I’m trying to think, I mean, what I can tell you anecdotally is that, you know, everybody talks about work-life balance and the effect that work has on your home life, but it goes the other way as well. And when people start ruminating about their marriage, you know, or a business divorce, right, divorcing their partnership or their partner, it takes a lot of mental energy and it starts to affect how they show up for work, right?

And so I’m trying to think of stories, I mean, I know so many people who have said this, and unfortunately, I actually looked at one point for statistics, for studies, for something like that, and there is just not a whole lot out there, right? That’s interesting. Everybody studies the other way around, but they don’t study the effect that being on the fence has on, you know, your business, your work performance, your whatever. 

So what I’ve done is cobbled together some statistics that might be interesting for people that relate to this, although they weren’t studying this exact problem. For example, one of the things that happens when, you know, when you have a problem that you can’t solve, your brain starts to loop and loop and loop, right? And so that causes something known as decision fatigue, right? Because you’re so preoccupied with the one question, you’re like, should I do this? I don’t know, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. 

According to Harvard Business Review, we make as humans in our world today about 33 to 35,000 decisions a day, per day. So when we wake up fresh in the morning, we’re able to make, you know, really good decisions because our brains are fresh and everything is easy. But as we go through the day and make more and more decisions, we become less efficient at it, less effective at it. We are fatigued, right? We have decision fatigue. And so that’s why if you’ve had a really hard day at the office and you’ve had to decide a lot of things and you’ve had a lot coming at you, by the time you get home, you open the refrigerator door and you do the death stare.

 Because you can’t even decide like what you want to eat that day, it’s too much, right? That’s why Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, like Steve Jobs always showed up in the black t-shirt or the black turtleneck and Mark Zuckerberg is a t-shirt, right? And the reason they do that is because they don’t have to decide what to wear that day. It takes that decision off the table. And so people have known this, you know, high level people have known this for a long time that if you want to save your brain power for the decisions that matter, you’ve got to clear it of the ones that don’t. Well, when you’re ruminating over, should I stay or should I go or what about this or what about that, that immediately sucks some of that energy away from you and drains you of the power that you have to make really good decisions in your business that day.

Meg:
My husband and I were talking about this last night, that the lack of decisiveness means that as the founder, CEO, business owner, if you’re indecisive, you’re not giving clear signals to the people who probably have the marching orders to execute, get the job done. You’re the business owner, and maybe you’re the owner-operator, but if you own a business where you’ve got employees and you’re not clear with your directives, or you’re assuming that because you said it once that they’re going to follow through and get it done properly.

When you’re distracted, I’m thinking of some of my franchisee placements who don’t work together with their spouse, but the business lives in their marriage, and their marriage lives in their business. I can think of some of my placements who I know are struggling or have struggled with how to preserve revenue and profitability culture when there’s so much discord.

Karen:
Yeah 100%, I was just speaking with someone yesterday who is the owner of a construction company, small construction company, and his profitability has gone way, way, way down. As he tries to figure out, I don’t know, should I do this, should I not do this, he’s distracted. When you’re ruminating about something, you don’t have the same level of confidence in yourself. You’re not making as good of decisions or as many decisions, and so his productivity has really been affected.

And then when you actually start the divorce, that also doesn’t help because in the beginning, that’s when usually divorces, there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of emotion, there’s a lot of crazy going on in the beginning. And so that too, it distracts you, it takes your focus, it affects your ability to function and make decisions, and even if you’re trying as best you can to hold it all together at work, don’t think that your employees can’t see that. Of course they can, right? No matter how much you’re trying to hide it. So it’s a big deal.

Meg:
I remember now telling my own story, just to your point, I think as humans don’t realize how much of what’s going on inside of our heads comes out in body language and behavior that we’re not even really paying attention to. And case in point, I was at one of my businesses and I was so in my head, I was heaving these huge, heavy size.

And one of my employees said, are you okay? Are you feeling okay? And I hadn’t even realized how I walked through the door, I put my stuff down in the office, I came down, I was counting the drawer, I was looking at reports. And this divorce that was looming was just so prevalent. One other time, I had gone in and they’re like, you’re just spewing green vomit all over everybody. And it took me, it’s like being grabbed by the scruff of my neck. I hadn’t realized how much of the divorce I was carrying in and foisting on my employees.

Karen:
Yeah. And look, we’re all human.
Of course, you’re going to do it. You know, like what happens in one arena or area of life, of course, bleeds over into the other. And we all look at what, you know, work does to home life, but what does home life do to work? And so if you really want to be effective in both places, you have to pay attention to both places and deal with the issues that are in both places so that you can have some harmony and really get that work-life balance that everybody talks about.

Meg:
Yeah, the great elusive work-life balance, even when you have a great marriage, it’s hard to have a great

Meg:
Yeah, Pete and I were just talking, as I said, last night. We had a hard conversation about hard things that need to be done.
And even for us, this isn’t our first marriage, but we’re business partners in, I think we’ve got seven businesses now. Wow. He’s got some that are just his. I’ve got some that are just mine. But we have conversation that goes back and forth. And last night was a hard night because when you have that much going on, plus we’ve got adult children who now have their own children and moving parts. One is in the hospital and one’s got a baby that’s not feeling well. Even with a good marriage, it’s hard to have that work-life balance.

Karen:
Yeah, 100 percent. But what you sort of glossed over that people really need to hear is you had a conversation about it. The problem when you’re on the fence is that the only conversation is going on in your own head. Or maybe it’s going on with a good friend over and over and over again, but you’re not actually dealing with the problem, you’re just spinning. And the longer you spin, the more distracted you are, the more everything else in your life starts to suffer.

And to your point about a business divorce, it’s even worse in that context because all day long while you’re at your business, you’re sort of half there, you’re being guarded about what you say, what you do, what you do. You’re not having the hard conversations. So just the fact of making a decision to have a conversation, to say we have to do something about what’s going on, is a step in the right direction and it starts to let that pressure out. Right? So you can start to function again and you can start to think more clearly.

Meg:
It’s so hard when you’ve got a husband and wife who got into business together, and now the divorce is happening and trying to figure out, think about the multi-pronged dimensions here, the financials. And then who’s going to get the business or how’s the business going to be split up?
Who’s going to be involved? Who’s looking at the books? Who’s hiding what in the books? So that when the divorce goes through, the valuation, is it accurate? So I’m well aware of the games that go on behind the scenes for people who are now trying to navigate this path of who’s going to get what.

Karen:
I think that’s one of the most difficult situations in divorce. I mean, there are certain situations that are stereotypically super hard to resolve. And when you’ve got a family-owned business, whereas my husband and wife both work in the business together, and it truly was their business, that’s hard. Because when they divorce in their marriage, it becomes doubly hard to function well together as a team in the business, which means one person gets the business and one person doesn’t, which means they have to find a job or another business or another way to support themselves. So it becomes really, really hard.

I dealt with this with a particular client where both she and her spouse were intimately involved in a business. And so the decision becomes, okay, if he was going to keep the business because he was the creative force behind it, but she was the back office, she was operations, right? They both needed each other, but of the two, she was the easier one to replace because he was the creative genius, so to speak, behind it. Now she has no income and no way to support herself. And by the way, they’ve been doing this for decades together. So now what do you do? And now if he wants to keep the business, he’s got to support her, right? There really isn’t an easy way around that other than that. 

So I helped her through coaching look at all of the different options because when you’re in that situation, you could, I mean, theoretically, I’ve had some clients who they keep both spouses on the payroll, like they continue to work together, but they find a way to silo themselves, at least in the beginning, or they keep each other on the payroll, they minimize one spouse’s role so that they’re not around all the time, they’re not together all the time, they’re not in each other’s basis while they’re going through a divorce and afterwards. 

But they’re still on the payroll, so they have some income, so they have health insurance, so they can deal with those things while the other spouse tries to find another business or another job. And then there are those relationships where that’s just not possible, right? So it starts with, if you’re going to do this, first of all, figuring out for yourself what would work for you? 

Are you going to emotionally and psychologically be able to see the person you’re divorcing every single day at work and function, and being honest with yourself about yes or no, and getting the support you need to do that because both of you are going to need support to be able to do that effectively? And if you can’t, then start thinking about what are all my options, how can we solve the financial problem without, you know, if we solve that, then that gives us space to breathe emotionally and psychologically.

Meg:
It’s interesting to me as I’m listening to you how much of my own married life I have buried and forgotten about. And what I’m saying, the reason I’m saying that is, I don’t talk about this very much, but I’ll say it here, I’m now married for the third time.

I never thought I’d get divorced once and never in my wildest dreams did I think that I was going to get divorced twice. So the first one, that’s my son’s father, we were in business together with Great Clips. That was his decision to buy the franchise, the first one. And then I got involved in the business and as we were separating, he said, no alimony, no child support, you take the businesses. Like, okay, bring it on. At least I had the businesses. 

The second time around, I married into, I married someone who owned a business that was becoming a rather big deal nationally. And one day he said, I don’t love you, I don’t like you and I don’t want to be married for more one day and i was working in his business and that’s the story you were saying a minute ago. That is how I found myself in the fetal position saying, holy shit, I’m not part of the business. I have no paycheck. He has excommunicated me completely. I got nothing.

Karen:
Yeah, it’s a double loss, right? So divorce by itself, when your marriage crumbles, you’ve lost a lot.
You’ve lost your spouse, you’ve lost your marriage, you’ve lost your dream about what you thought life would be, your identity takes a hit. I mean, you lose a lot, but then when you add on top of that, oh, and you have no livelihood and your business is gone, I’m not surprised you were in the field position.

Meg:
I am so glad that I’ve got the fortitude to get back up, but it was a real case study in feeling the pain, letting it out, it took me months to let it all out. I woke up every morning, and I’m sure this is how some people feel about going to work when you work with your spouse and you know the divorce is imminent.
You will wake up in the morning and say, okay, it’s a new day. Oh, it’s another day.

Karen:
Oh yeah, you don’t even want to get out of bed, let alone go to the office or go to wherever it is that you’ve got to go to get the job done. And to think that that doesn’t, that energy doesn’t spill out into everyone you’re dealing with. I mean, we’re talking employees, of course they’re going to pick it up, but guess what? So do your customers.

So do your clients. And so it starts to have an effect on the business in so many levels. I remember working with a woman who she was, she would work in her husband’s jewelry store. They built it together and, you know, it started, you know, her, the divorce and the discontent and building up to the point where they got divorced, where things were just not going well in the marriage, blah, blah, blah, clients would pick it up. People that would come into the store. It would affect them.
And so you just, the longer you’re on the fence, the more your life takes a hit on every level.

Meg:
This is why I say, and you do too, hair a coach, don’t try to navigate this alone. It’s a heavy lift to decide for sure if you’re going to get divorced or not.

And this is what I really appreciate about your practice is that you’re not necessarily an advocate having been there in court for so many years, seeing the demise of the marriage, but the devastation personally. I appreciate about your current practice that divorce isn’t always the right solution. But don’t try to navigate this decision alone, work with someone like you who’s, you’ve been in the trenches with your clients and now you’re approaching it from a completely different vantage point.

Karen:
A hundred percent, and my message to everyone that I work with is the same. I don’t want to push you into a divorce. I don’t want to push you into staying merry. My goal for my clients is to help them make a decision, because once you make a decision, all of a sudden, the weight of the world comes off of your shoulders, and you can take action in one direction or another.

The worst place to be is an indecision. So if you can’t figure out, oh, is my marriage working? Should I stay? Should I go? I don’t know. I don’t know. And you’re open to working on the marriage, and your spouse is open to working on the marriage. Go do that all day long, because if you go do that, and you put your all into it, and you really go all in, and it doesn’t work, then you’re going to be able to leave with a clean heart and say, this just wasn’t meant to be. But if you still have those, I don’t know, yes, no, should I, shouldn’t I, when you’re in that space of indecision, that’s when you pay the price. 

That’s when you lose energy. That’s when you’re not psychologically or emotionally clear. You start losing focus. You start losing confidence. People don’t understand the toll that being an indecision takes on your own personal confidence. Well, you can’t be a leader of a business and be on confidence. That doesn’t work really well. People have to believe in you. You have to lead. They have to trust you. They’re not going to do that as much when you’re like, oh, I don’t know. Or your anger or your upset is spilling out over into everything else you do. I mean, the indecision is the killer. Yeah.

Meg:
Absolutely seen it, done it, been there myself and there’s so many reasons why people get stuck. People are stuck in fear, they’re stuck in codependency.

Gosh, some of your interviews as I listen to your podcast, you’ve got so many great points of view from people who said, I was stuck and here’s why I was married to a narcissist. Didn’t know that he was until I knew clearly that he was. I had to get out, I couldn’t figure out how to get out, he’s manipulating me. Well, maybe I should stay because then, so your podcasts have been so enlightening. I think the people you’ve had on bring their personal stories. It’s such an enlightening podcast. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who’s listening to this and feeling indecisive and sitting on the fence because you’re going to relate to Karen’s guests. You’re going to relate to the stories that Karen’s guests are telling. They’re fairly universal. You could probably boil it down to just a few common sticking points. It’s for the kids, it’s for the whatever it might be.

Karen:
There are, there’s a few recurrent themes, I should say. And what keeps people stuck is typically, number one, fear of the unknown, uncertainty. I don’t know how this is gonna go. And somehow, they think that when they’re not sure how things are gonna go on a personal level, that’s different than a business decision. But if you think about it, as you’re deciding when you’re, are you gonna buy this franchise? Are you going to take a certain business action that will take resources, take time, take money, commit to this? You never know what the outcome is going to be. There’s always uncertainty. It’s just that when the uncertainty is on a personal level, it feels different, right? And that’s what locks people up.

Or the other thing that keeps people, you know, keeps people stuck is their kids. You’re right. I don’t want my kids to experience broken family. I don’t want to mess them up. I don’t want them to become juvenile delinquents. I don’t want them, I don’t want them to hate me, right? Which is something that people often have a hard time articulating, but it’s the relationship with their children that they’re worried about as much as are their children gonna be okay, right? And especially if they’re older, they’re worried about that relationship and the impact it’ll have on them.

And then the third thing that gets people all bound up is what I call a values conflict. And that is, I believe in marriage, I said I was going to stay married till death do I part, and now I want to get a divorce and I’m not dead yet. So what happened, I can’t do this, right? I am not the kind of person who gets a divorce. And you might’ve felt that too, and it’s not until you can in your own, not only just your head, but in your being, reconcile those two conflicting values that you can actually move forward and do something, right? And get the divorce or commit to making the marriage work until unless it doesn’t, right? But you’ve got to take action and action is what gets you out of indecision. One way or the other. 

Meg:
This is reminding me, Karen, of yet another personal story. Case in point, with my first marriage, he had said for years, this is a mistake, he was 13 years older than I am. And so he said repeatedly, I shouldn’t have gotten married, I should have just stayed single, I should have, I should have, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.

And right before 10th anniversary, I said, you know what, I’ll take you up on this. You’re indecisive about this, I’ll take you up on it, let’s do it. Like, I don’t know where it came from, Karen, but it came out of me. So that, for me, I didn’t have the burden of carrying his issue of being married. Then, turning the corner here, my parents had a place up in Door County and I was with my son, who was little at the time, six, maybe, or seven. And heaving those heavy sobs, those size, all weekend long, from Friday until Sunday, my parents finally just sat me down at lunch on Sunday. 

What is going on? I couldn’t tell them that this was happening because I committed to, like, they, they’re still married. I couldn’t tell them that this was failing, or that we had failed, that he had failed, and I was taking him up on it. But once I finally let it all hang out, yeah, so that drive home from Door County back to Chicago is so much easier because they didn’t have the weight of, how am I going to tell them what’s going on?

Rip off the Band-Aid, people, rip it off. It’s so much better once you get it out and can deal with, now, the practical reality versus all the cycling, arcing, as I call it, you’re up and then you’re down and it takes so much of your day. You’ll get so much of your life back just by making a decision.

Karen:
100% and people are always, what keeps people all gummed up is they’re afraid of making the wrong decision. But there are very few decisions in life that are absolute and unchangeable. Sometimes there are, right? And you think, well, if I say, you know, if I say I want a divorce, I can’t change my mind. Well, yeah, changing your mind at that point does become a little trickier.

I’m going to give you that. But I’ve seen, I was in court one day and people have a different idea of what divorce court is than what it actually is. So picture a small courtroom with a lot of people all jammed in. There was a husband and wife and their lawyers standing in front of the bench and they were doing the final hearing for the divorce, right? And they’re going through things and the wife is crying and the husband is crying and the judge is like, oh my God. And I can’t remember exactly what the question was. The lawyer was asking the husband or I think it was the husband questions, right? 

And clearly, like you get from just sitting in the audience that the husband must have cheated and the wife got angry and said, that’s it, we’re done. It was a long-term marriage. So they’re getting a divorce. The lawyer’s asking him questions basically like, you know, are you sure that your marriage is irretrievably broken? And there’s no hope of it coming back, right? These are like the routine questions. This is not supposed to evoke an emotional answer. 

And the husband breaks down sobbing in the front of the whole courtroom. I am so sorry. I never should have done this. I really love you. Oh my God. Oh my God. And the judge is looking down going, what do I do with this, right? And you know, would you ever take me back? Now, mind you, these people went all the way through their divorce. They divided all their stuff. They went through, you know, everything that had been going on for, I don’t know, eight months a year. They’re in the last second. He’s crying. She’s crying. The judge is like, you guys go out in the hallway and figure it out, right? And they, I don’t know if they ultimately ever got divorced, but they sure didn’t get divorced that day.

They both said, no, we want to go. We want to work. You know, we have to talk. We have to work. So the point is that, you know, every decision, if you look at a decision as life or death, binary, right or wrong, and there’s no going back, it becomes very, very difficult to make that decision. But if you look at a decision as, okay, this is the best I can do with the information that I have right now, and if I make it this way, is there a way that I could maybe circle back and regroup and change the decision later? It just takes the weight off. Then you make the decision, and all of a sudden, you can breathe again. Yes, it’s amazing.

Meg:
And I can think of how many people in a business have made that determination that the divorce needed to happen and they do it. Well, now it’s not every niggling little thing 24-7. They’re no longer married, but they’re still in the business together. Now they can function as human beings, business people, better in the business.

They were good business partners. They just weren’t good marital partners. And it spilled into the business, but now that the stress, to your point, now the stress has gone from the marriage, they can operate. But I know people who’ve gotten divorced, divorced now still live together, or they’ve got house sharing. There’s a lot of different ways to make it work despite the disharmony.

Karen:
You know, we had a stereotype in our society of what divorce looks like, how it has to be, what you’re gonna go through, and honestly, that’s all nonsense. I’ve seen every permutation of every way you can do it and not do it, and you know, in 2008, to your point, when the housing crisis was going on, people were getting divorced and they couldn’t afford to split up. They couldn’t, they weren’t able to sell their house, and they, you know, because they were upside down in the mortgage, so they had to continue to live in that house together until things turned around, they got back on level, and they could at least sell and break even, right? So they had to make it work, and people do, but the challenge is there’s a time when it’s just really, really difficult.

So in that time period, as you’re transitioning from married, happily married to happily divorced, you have to find a way to deal with your own issues, your own emotion, your own anger, your upset, your crying, your whatever, because everybody, what people wanna do is in that time period, that’s when you’re finger pointing, that’s when you’re blank, it’s your fault. If you didn’t do this, I wouldn’t do that. That doesn’t work. Take responsibility and control of your own emotions, and if you can control this, you’re gonna show up differently, and your spouse is gonna stop pushing your buttons, because the buttons are gone. There’s no button to push, right?

Meg:
No, truer words. We are in control of our own emotions.

We determine how we receive input, how we assign our emotions or lack of emotions to those inputs. And yeah, as I think about a couple of my friends who are really good at deflecting, parsing, compartmentalizing, that’s really what you need to be able to do when you’re in the thick of it is to compartmentalize and deflect until such time that you can really come to terms that this is going to happen.

Karen:
Right. You compartmentalize and deflect while you need to, to get a certain job done. Like, for instance, while you’re at work, right? And this is whether you’re in business with your spouse or not.

When you’re stuck on the fence or you’re going through a divorce, you need to compartmentalize that as much as you can at that time. But then when you’re on your own time, you also need to feel all the feels and go through the emotions and process things so that they don’t get stuck in your body and stuck in your psyche. And then because when that happens, then it’s coming out at work for years and years and years. That’s not optimal. That’s not what you want to have happen. So it’s about compartmentalizing when you need to, to get a certain task or job done, but also taking the time for yourself to process so that you don’t get stuck in that ugly place.

Meg:
All right. Well, this has been really great. It’s a little bit of a therapy session for me this morning.

Going down memory lane. It really is amazing how resilient we are when, because my first husband, we ended up co-parenting just fine. He’s a great kid. He’s 35 years old. He’s successful. He’s happily married. He’s got his own values now for what he saw us go through. We’re resilient people, but you really, for the audience, please pull up Karen’s podcast. Off the fence. Get off the fence. Take a look at her website. It’s Karen Covey, C-O-V-Y. Karen Covey, divorce. It’s easy to find if you put it in your search bar. So much great content. I do try to listen to all of your episodes because I have a healthy marriage and I want to keep having a healthy marriage. You have some great guests and really terrific insights. So I really appreciate you.

Actually, in short order here, we just decided to do this earlier this week. So thank you so much for taking the time for me and coming back to the podcast, Karen.

Karen:
Thank you so much for having me. You know I always love our conversations. I could talk to you forever.

Meg:
I know, I know. That’s why I’m looking at the clock here. My editor is going to be like, hey, cut, cut. Thank you so much for joining me today.