What’s The Episode About:
In this episode, Paul and Stacey will share the story of where they were 10 years ago when they lost everything and had to start over. It all started when they lost their consulting business and started experiencing financial difficulties that pushed them to get jobs.
Fast forward 10 years, they’re now doing great, and they will share how overcoming financial challenges helped them create relationship development for the benefit of others. Their story will help you plan out your future towards success and fulfillment in your personal and professional lives, so you won’t wanna miss it. Enjoy!
Key Points Discussed:
- Reflecting back on the changes in the last 10 years (01:45)
- Heading towards bankruptcy and having to take up jobs (04:27)
- Fighting the wrong enemy: Blame games in a marriage (08:10)
- Breaking the chains of demand relationship for the future of the children (12:27)
- We take the boldest, biggest action when we have the most certainty (16:56)
Where Can I Learn More:
- The 14-Day Boost Program
- www.CashflowTactics.com
- Have you signed up for The D.I.R.T. ?! http://bit.ly/2KlobXZ
- Check out our programs: www.RelationshipDevelopment.org/Programs
- See our upcoming events: www.RelationshipDevelopment.org/Events
When Did It Air:
October 24, 2019
Episode Transcript:
Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors
Paul: 00:00 Hey relationship transformers. Welcome to the Relationship Transformer podcast. Today, Stacey and I are going to share a story of where we were 10 years ago when we lost everything and had to start all over. Have you ever faced a financial crisis? It can add a lot of stress to a relationship and a family, and we’re going to share our story today. And hey, if you get some value from today’s podcast, please share it with someone that needs to hear it, okay? So let’s cue up that intro and dive in.
Intro: 00:30 So the big question is this, how is it possible that one person alone can transform any relationship, save their marriage, great their unshakeable love and unleash passion, divorce, proof their family without needing their partner to get on board and do this with them and yet still get to be happily, authentically you without compromise. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer.
Stacey: 00:59 So, the other day I was listening to Marketing Secrets podcast with our friend Russell Brunson. It’s an amazing podcast by the way. You should totally listen to it. And, he was talking about how he was in Fiji, at Namale, Tony Robbins’ resort. And, looking back on 10 years ago, standing in the exact same spot at Namale in Fiji, 10 years ago, in this same exact room, and reflecting back on the changes in the 10 years. And he was saying how, you know, Tony Robbins teaches that you will massively overestimate what you think you can achieve in a year, but you will massively underestimate what you can actually achieve in a decade. And that’s something that we know that Tony Robbins has taught us too, years and years and years ago. And it got me thinking about our journey. Here we are. It’s 2019 right now. So 10 years ago it was 2009, and just thinking about, oh my gosh, think about yourself too, where were you in 2009? What was going on?
Stacey: 02:00 I never could have imagined that we would be here today doing what we’re doing. In 2009, just to give you some frame of reference if you don’t know our story, we were at the start of a financial crisis for our family. Paul and I both had IT consulting jobs. And, back then that’s what we did by the way. We had a mission to help people with their relationships, but that wasn’t… we didn’t have an organization, we didn’t have it as a business. It was just something that we had as a mission, but we had jobs. We had jobs like everybody else, and we were both in IT consulting in different aspects. I was tax and Paul was tech. And, in January… it was actually January 21st of 2009, I’ll never forget it for as long as I live, three of our consulting contracts, three very large consulting contracts got frozen on the exact same day.
Stacey: 02:52 I don’t know if any of you were in the consulting or corporate business back then, but boy, contracts were getting pulled and frozen left and right, like cause everybody was heading into a financial meltdown. And it didn’t really occur to us. We always thought we were diversified. Right? Oh, our consulting business is diversified, because Stacey’s customers are tax customers and mine are small companies, and I do tech, and yet three massive contracts that really comprised the bulk of our income for our company got frozen on the exact same day. I’ll never forget it. And we didn’t know what to do. We tried everything to reinvent ourselves. We tried every contact that we had, we both had waiting lists of companies that wanted to work with us. We reached out to every one of them and every one of them said the same thing, “Oh my God, I wish we could, but we can’t. It’s frozen. It’s frozen. It’s frozen. It’s frozen.”
Stacey: 03:43 Yeah, “We can’t, we don’t have any budget. It’s frozen. Everything’s been frozen. There’s no spending.” No spending is all we heard at every turn. And we started to scramble like, “Okay, think outside the box. How else can we do this? Like, what can we learn? How else can we do this?” We tried everything we could to reinvent our consulting companies. And in the meantime, the expenses every single month are being paid, and paid, and paid. And the balances are being… going down, and down, and down. And maybe you’ve been through this yourself, thinking, “Oh my gosh. We’re totally going to turn this around, like we’re a week away. We’re a week away. It’ll be fine. We’ll turn this around”, thinking cause we always have, like every… we’ve always had, no, there’s never been a problem like this. And, it was good ways into 2009 when Paul and I started to face the darkness of, we’re heading into a dangerous place here financially.
Stacey: 04:37 Like we’re dwindling down to the point that I don’t know what we’re going to do for our family. And we had tried everything. And it’s so funny how sometimes we ask for what we want, right? Paula and I wanted to be able to get our consulting companies back off the ground and clearly the universe had a divine plan for us to be redirected. Like, Nope, that consulting thing’s not gonna work. Nope. That consulting right. Cause we are being divinely redirected into creating what is now relationship development because everything had burned down to the ground and I just want to say because I know that financial crisis and even just financial challenges can put such a huge strain on a relationship and actually the truth is that relationship development was born out of that financial crisis. And I want to tell you how that happened. See Paul and I were heading towards bankruptcy so fast forward to 2010 and we were heading towards bankruptcy where there was not a lot of cash left.
Stacey: 05:41 We were worried that we were going to lose our house. We had two babies sleeping upstairs in bed and we sat at the kitchen table wondering what is our next move and as much as we totally did not want to do it, our next move ended up being that Paul going to take a job in it consulting for another company, like not working for ourselves and our own company but take a job for an it consulting company. And back then, and even still now, but back then for Paul, that meant travel Monday through Friday. And Paul and I had actually never been apart our whole marriage together. We’d never slept apart one single night. And for the first time now with two kids, two babies sleeping upstairs, Paul was going to have to get on a plane every single Sunday night and come home every single Friday night and then do it again Sunday night and come home Friday night and be away from his family.
Stacey: 06:35 And lots of consultants are away from their families and that, and my heart goes out to everybody who has to travel for work. We love each other very deeply and we love our family very much. And Paul didn’t want to go and we certainly didn’t want him to go and it was super, super painful, but we had to be financially responsible to our children, to our family, to our house. And so Paul took a job as an it consultant and I actually took a job going back to doing something that I really did not want, which was corporate tax for a firm like for a big company. But it was something that would let me work from home because with two kids at home and Paul gone, I have a choice. Like I had to find something that I could do where I could mostly work from home.
Stacey: 07:18 And it was a really tough time, but we started to rebuild. But during that time we noticed family after family, people that we knew, people with kids, little kids. Our son was in preschool at the time, and people with little kids, we would just watch the financial crisis be kinda like the straw that broke the camel’s back, which is horrible saying, I don’t know why we say that, but it ended up being the final straw. Right? It’s a thing that the relationship might’ve been a little bit shaky to begin with, but under this kind of financial pressure, what we saw was people going into blame, right? Well, this wouldn’t have happened if you did this or Oh my gosh, look, you made the worst decision possible. And now look at the results and going back and forth pitting against each other. You know, when we blame each other, we’re fighting the wrong enemy.
Stacey: 08:10 The beautiful thing of having a family, the beautiful thing of being married is that it’s us against them. It’s not us against us. It’s about you and I facing the world together together as a team, not facing off against each other. I hope that lands with you today, by the way, as part of the story. But as Paul and I started to see that there was a moment that happened for Paul that changed the trajectory of our lives.
Paul: 08:38 Yeah. So I’m dropping off our son at school and he was like four at the time and it was, uh, you know, a preschool thing and he had mentioned to me before he gets out of the truck, he’s like, Hey, by the way, I heard, and you know, insert friend’s name here. The parents are our, I forget his words, but basically what he was saying to me is, cause he didn’t have the exact words for getting divorced and we knew this family and we knew these parents and they’re good people who really just, you know, had the best of intentions, loved each other, and we knew, we knew it was, again, it’s another symptom of this situation where they were having financial troubles and it was the final straw that broke the relationship so that it was, they felt it was unrepairable. And you know, as I’m driving away, at first I just kind of took it in and I’m like, yep, you know, part of me is like, yep, that’s another one, right? There’s another one, this is going on everywhere. And then another part of me as I drove out and I’m going out of the parking lot, it started to hit me. It started to like, because my son was the same age as these kids nervous, there were two of them in that household and I started to think about Estacio assessors.
Paul: 09:41 Now there’s two kids who may not be with both parents anymore or living in separate households where the kind of fighting that’s going to happen or what are they going to go through. And I saw them through my son’s eyes as if it was him and I kind of experienced it firsthand for myself and it just haunted me. It kept haunting me the whole way home. It haunted me for days afterwards where I’m like, it’s just, it was unnecessary from my perspective. I if like if they just knew what we knew this could’ve been prevented was our, our belief about that situation. Not that we can speak for someone else, but that was our belief possible as possible. So it became this thing where I had this metaphor that came from it and the metaphor that kind of played out in my head was a visual.
Paul: 10:21 One of, you know, me standing back or Stacy, both of us standing back basically and watching as someone’s approaching an open manhole cover and not doing anything to stop them from falling into it and not saying anything. Even though we could see it, we can give them a heads up. We see they’re not aware and then just doing nothing. What kind of person does that make us? And it became a problem where it’s like, actually I can’t just sit back anymore and you know, we have to do something. So that led to some conversations at the kitchen table at a time when we’re at a financial crisis saying, Hey, not only can we not keep moving forward, but we have to completely change everything that we do because we can’t sit back and not do anything about this. Anyway. So
Stacey: 11:03 Paul comes to me and my husband’s a very passionate man and he’s telling me this story and I’m feeling him with my heart. And then it takes a turn with the story and he’s, and Paul’s like, so Stacey, we have to do something about this. And I’m like, yes, what do we do? And he’s like, we have to figure out a way to help people with what we know. And I’m like, wait a minute, what? No. I’m like, first of all, no. Second of all. No, I’m a hard no like what do you mean? But I said to my husband at the time was, first of all, PS were in a financial crisis and every single extra minute that we have in the day, we need to use that to make money right now because we are gonna lose our house if we don’t take this seriously.
Stacey: 11:46 So I had already been working two jobs by the way at that point. And Paul was working one and traveling and we had to recover financially. You know, no joking matter. I’m sure if you’ve been there, you know, I’m like, this is not the time to start devoting all of our time to serving people as much as my heart wants to serve them. I can’t give my time to something without getting paid for it right now. Cause I have to be responsible to our house, um, and get our house in order. And then the second no was, I don’t want to be that person where people are like, Oh, you think you can help me with my marriage here were you, yours is so great. You’re sticking your nose into my business. I’m like, everybody’s going to hate me. I don’t want to be that person.
Stacey: 12:27 Like, no, there’s gotta be no. There’s a no. And so Paul, of course super-passionate helped me get out of my fear mind and into my heart space and using what he knows is already my trigger point, which is okay Stacey, but what about those kids? What about the kids in the house? Who’s going to stand up for these children? If we don’t do something? Who’s going to make it better for them? Who’s going to make their life better if we don’t take action? And then I was a goner because that’s what my whole motivation is. That’s everything that we do is to make life different for children. And you know, the whole mission behind relationship development is we are changing the way relationship is done and we’re doing it so that your children will learn relationship development by watching you, by being in a household with you, you are the one who’s going to break the chains of demand, relationship in your family’s legacy.
Stacey: 13:27 So your children will live from relationship development and won’t need me because our children are the key. They can flip the switch on this disposable relationship dynamic we’ve all been handed, they have the ability to do that if we live differently. And that’s pretty much the entire reason behind why Paul and I do everything that we do. And so of course in that minute I’m like, Oh my gosh, okay, we’re doing this, we’re doing this. How do we do this? And literally that’s how this organization was born. Paul and I dedicated two years to figuring out everything that we would do, how we would teach people what we want to teach people that we know works, what we want to make sure people know not to do because it’s what the conventional relationship advices out there that’s destroying relationships and make sure they know what not to do.
Stacey: 14:17 How would we teach it? How would we make it actionable so that anybody without our 20 plus years of personal development and relationship experience can actually implement it and get results right away and in what order and how can we get results? And that’s where we started. We started putting it together. It took us years to do. By the time we were ready to start getting our process, and that’s how we created our eight step relationship transformation system was during that time while I was working two jobs and Paul was working one and I was kind of a single parent Monday through Friday while he was, and it was very painful for him to be away from us for so long. We built our relationship transformation system and then it came time for us to figure out, okay, now why do we find some people we need to get this out in front of people.
Stacey: 15:05 We knew we didn’t know how to do that, and so we did what we teach you to do now we live what we’re teaching you, which is how to reach for the hand of lad, how to reach for the mentor, who’s the best at this, who knows how to do this and that’s not free. And so I took on a third job to be able to invest, like I just said on the last podcast, invest in your mindset. Invest in your skillsets, invest in your networks, right? That’s what Ryan and Brad say and we did. I took on another job in order to do that and we invested in working with a mentor who knew how to teach us how to frame a message and put a course together and all of the things that we did and we’ve always worked with mentors and always been blessed with great tribes in order to be able to get relationship development out there in a bigger way and create the framework for demand relationship versus relationship development.
Stacey: 15:58 That whole framework came through me when I was working with Russell Brunson on how to get our message through in a way that everybody can receive it and really, really use it in Uplevel, how we teach what we do and how we do what we do and I never in a million years, 10 years ago, figuring out which tax job should I take to try to save our house would have imagined that at this point we would be the creators of relationship development. We would have discovered the demand relationship versus relationship development like framework created over 300 relationship development tools in the toolbox had multiple levels of courses doing live events, four or five of live events every single year, helping thousands and thousands of people around the world in 65 countries like changing the world for the better. Never ever would have imagined. That being the version of myself that I was in that moment.
Stacey: 16:56 One of the key things I want you to get from that though is we take action. Typically we take the boldest, biggest action when we feel like we have the most certainty. See what if I were to a be able to go back to 2009 Stacey and say, okay, but in 2019 you’re going to be the most financially abundant you’ve ever been. Have helped the most people, more people than you could ever imagine. Helping ever have impacted thousands and thousands of people more than you’ve ever expected. You spoke in front of 30,000 people in the stadium like this, these things that we never would have imagined, but if you knew that was the outcome, how much more action would you be taking? How much more bold this would you find? Like with certainty, we take so much more and so what I want you to get from this lesson is if you can know, like sometimes we have a year and we’re like, damn, I really thought I would have accomplished more this year and yet I had a setback.
Stacey: 18:04 Well, hello, that would have been my 2009 and if I had based all my action in 2009 based on what I saw in 2009 that would produce one result. If I based all my action in 2009 based on what I knew would happen in the next 10 years, that would create a different result. So when you look at the action that you’re taking this year, when you look at the belief that you have around what you can create, take your certainty from knowing that you are going to so far out pass the results you could think you could get in 10 years. Bring that level of certainty right now to 2019 or whatever year it is for you right now. And now, what kind of action will you take today? Now, what will you do? So many people come to us in the phase of relationship and they’re like, you know, I don’t know.
Stacey: 19:00 I don’t know if I want to do this. I don’t even know if I want to bother. I know. And what they’re really looking for is certainty. Like, well, if I knew that a year from now I would be saying, Oh my God, I didn’t even know love could be like this. I didn’t know sex could be like this. Oh my God. Well, what action would you be taking today? They’d be like, Oh my God, all of it. Well, hello them. Do it. Then do it. Why are you holding back on creating your own results? Use the certainty that you can gain from knowing that you will far out past the achievements that you think you can make in 10 years. Bring that into your moment of the day today.
Paul: 19:40 Absolutely, and you just have to recognize that you know, no matter what you think the future holds right now, positive or negative, it’s just a thought. So why not choose the one that you want to go for one, I choose the empowered one, the one that have confidence and move forward because the truth is you’re moving forward whether you like it or not. So move forward with the goal in mind with the intentions in mind with the actions in mind of what you want to move forward to because both are just as real
Stacey: 20:09 and whatever’s going on in your worlds, whether it’s financial or relationship or health or career or family or kid, whatever it is. Please don’t think you’re the only one. We had a financial crisis in 2009 in 2010 on that very podcast, Russell was talking about how he was in Fiji in 2009 in this very room thinking, I’m going to double next year. I’m on a huge trajectory and just like a few months later he was like, Aw, I’m financially does to do it. It’s all over, and then he rebuilt bigger than ever, right? Please don’t think you’re alone. There’s not a person who has them been through the challenges of life. You and everybody else, you have a story. We have a story like whoever you’re looking to right now, they’ve got it all. They didn’t get it all on a direct dot from a to Z linear path. There was all kinds of crazy crap that happens on this journey through life. Don’t do the comparison monster thing and you won’t have certainty based on what you want to create from today, but you can pull certainty knowing that you’re going to outperform your 10-year vision in a massive way. If you take the action you want to do some action steps before we wrap up.
Paul: 21:27 I think it’s only fair. So number one, what can you start doing right now? Number one, looking back, look back 10 years. In what ways did you overestimate what you could have gotten done in one year? Number two, let’s look at today from where you are now. In what ways did you underestimate what you would have achieved in those past 10 years? Now, looking ahead in the next 10 years, anchor in a new level of belief around what is possible, knowing that you will massively underestimate what you can actually achieve in 10 years. What is your 10-year vision now? Number four, action. None of this will happen without massive strategic action. So what’s it going to be? Take that action today.
Stacey: 22:16 Alright, awesome. if you love the Relationship Transformer podcast, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Take a screenshot of your phone and share it, and until next time, remember together we are changing the way relationship is done. .
Outro: 22:34 Hey, would you like to get big results in your relationships in just 10 seconds a day? If so, then subscribe to our daily inspiration for relationship transformers or the D.I.R.T at www.MartinoPodcast.com/DIRT.