I would say I never really found a calling, but instead I found an area of expertise.
We go to school, we get our formal training, we think, oh, we're good, we're set to go.
No, you're not.
Pretty much in no career are you really set to go once you've had your formal training.
That's just the foundation.
I think when you have a learning mindset in your profession, if you can take that to your personal life, there's tons of areas that you're gonna apply that.
Welcome to Pendant Inc, a podcast where we discuss marriage and lasting love.
Today, we are going to talk about dual careers.
Last episode, we talked all about Melissa's career as a professional counselor and how that directly relates to our relationship.
She discussed some trends she sees in her many, many, many clients, and we discussed all sorts of things about mental health and how it impacts relationships.
Today, we're gonna pivot and talk a little bit about my career, and we're gonna see that it doesn't tie to relationships anywhere near as easily as a counselor does.
So, we're gonna focus today on the dual nature of our careers, the differences between our careers, the strengths that it allows us to bring to our relationship, and we're gonna talk about some transitions we've made when we've gone from both of us working to one staying home for our children to integrating back into the workplace.
So, we're gonna explore not only my career, but to make it relevant for relationships, we're gonna talk about how my career and such has played in a relationship.
That sound like a plan for today?
Sounds perfect.
All right, how are you feeling today?
I know this is a little bit out of your wheelhouse.
That's okay, that's okay.
I, you know, I do interview people for my job, but this is a little bit different.
This is getting broadcast.
That's just me and the other person.
I know other people are going to see this.
Exactly.
Hey, it's good for me, right?
Exactly.
If you've watched our last episode, we treated it a little bit different.
We did it interview style, and I interviewed Melissa all about her career and went through that.
I don't have an extensive background interviewing people, but I've done enough of it through my work, which we'll talk about here in a few minutes, that I was a bit more comfortable with sort of the back and forth on that.
So, I'm also gonna take the lead on this.
But before we go to that, here's what we're gonna cover through today.
We're gonna talk about our career differences.
We're gonna talk about building our dual careers.
We're gonna talk about our home life and when our careers and home life are out of balance.
That's a big thing that people struggle with is how do you balance career and home life?
And then we're gonna talk about transitions around changing careers and having kids and that sort of stuff.
So, with that, I think I'm gonna turn it over to Melissa and see how this goes.
It'll be great.
I'm ready.
So, Michael, can you give us the 30-second elevator speech about your chosen career?
Sure.
Oh, chosen career, that's good.
I did not choose my career.
We'll get into that in a little bit.
I sort of fell into my career.
But I'm an IT software developer at a large, privately held tech company.
I work in the marketing communications department, specifically in video communications.
And so, the team I'm on is video delivery technologies.
Basically, I'm a developer in a marketing organization for a large tech firm, focused on getting brand messages and video content out to the people.
There you go, that's 45 seconds of a 30-second.
It was just a little bit longer, but not bad, because some people will go into, but then I would have no questions to ask.
We'll go back to your 30-second first pass out.
And I think it was like three minutes.
We had to reset and go, no, 30 seconds.
Anyway, all right.
Who's leading this interview?
I am, I am.
Did you cover everything?
Are you ready for your first, like, real?
The last one wasn't really a question.
It was just, what's your, all right, Michael.
Where did your career start?
And, and how did you get to where you are today?
All right, we talked in the first episode, or your episode, about how you found your calling.
I would say, I never really found a calling, but instead, I found an area of expertise.
When we graduated college, you had a year left.
I needed to spend some time working.
I had gotten my degree in psychology with a minor in biology.
And I had this very unique offer that came to me.
I had a professor that I'd worked a lot with.
And I'm a little, I don't really wanna say this, because it makes us sound really old when we start talking about this stuff.
But he was writing textbooks for a publisher back then.
And this was when computer-based training was just starting.
And he had been contracted to write a supplemental computer-based CD-ROM that went in the back of textbooks.
And this sounds so stinking old now.
It's funny.
But he needed somebody to code it.
He needed somebody to develop it.
And he knew I was gonna be around for the summer, because he knew you, and knew you were gonna be their friend of the year.
He said, hey, you wanna spend the summer learning how to program, and then spend the next year creating that content with me.
And the thought process was, I knew all the technical stuff of the psychology, so what we were doing, trainings and experiments, I knew all that information.
And what I didn't know was the computer programming side.
So I spent a summer, learned computer programming. 30 years later, that's still what I do, but for many different ways.
But yeah, that's how I sort of rolled to my career.
Transitioned from that into actual web development.
Did that through the whole dot-com era.
Incredibly good technical time, but an incredibly heavy load, business load.
And then transitioned to my current company.
Nice.
And it seems like every couple of years, your job has kind of shifted.
So how many jobs, even though you're at the same company, and have been for quite some time, which we're going to get into, how many different jobs have you had while you've been at that company?
Yeah, I laugh a little bit, because I said, I'm an IT software developer.
Sure, okay, that means something to some people, but in my world, that's a little bit of just a title for what I do, because to your point, in the last, I mean, 10 years alone, I've had three different jobs within my same company.
I started off doing a lot of programming.
So I was writing tutorials, writing trainings, writing computer-based training modules, doing an actual good amount of coding.
Then that transitioned into doing web development and design.
So I have that background in psychology, which means I understand instructional design.
So I spend a good bit of time with the theory and process behind how do you teach, and then transitioning that into coding and programming tutorials and stuff.
Then I've transitioned into much more of a marketing-focused role.
Now I do content strategy, channel strategy, platform strategy.
Those are all buzzwords that don't mean a whole lot, but basically, I help our company understand how do we talk to whoever we're trying to talk to wherever we're trying to talk to them.
If we're trying to talk to them on our web properties, how do we do that primarily focused around video?
If we're trying to talk to them on social platforms, you know, your Instagrams, your Facebook, LinkedIn, how do we talk to them there?
And if you're trying to talk to them on YouTube, that's one of the areas I really focus.
I manage our channel and content strategy for the global organization there.
In addition to the technical of how do you actually get videos out there, I do a lot of consulting.
Long answer to my role changes every two or three years, even though my company doesn't, which is great.
It's how I've stayed with a company and not been burned out, is because I do something different every few years.
So a lot, I think is the answer.
A lot of, well, along those lines, the tech field is constantly changing.
Right.
And you're having to do continual learning on that.
It's a key part of what you, of your profession.
How do you manage that?
And how do you bring that into, or how does that fit into your personal life?
It's funny because your profession, one of our daughter's professions, requires official learning, CTEs or continuing eds or whatever.
So you guys have a whole governing body around that.
There is no such thing in tech as a governing requirement to keep your license or anything like that.
However, if you don't continually refresh your skill set, you get passed by.
And maybe even quicker than in your field.
I mean, the psychological principles change a lot slower than tech changes.
So continual learning is something I've always had to do, will always have to do.
It's part of what keeps the job fresh.
For our other daughters, it's in tech as well.
And so she's all about certifications and learning and new technology.
And it's a hard balance, right?
Because I think we go to school, we get our formal training, we think, oh, we're good, we're set to go.
No, you're not.
Pretty much in no career are you really set to go once you've had your formal training.
That's just the foundation.
And I would argue in IT, computer tech, knowledge, that's even more of an issue.
Your foundation doesn't really get you going there.
So I always have to learn, I'm always continually adding stuff.
But the nice thing and how that sort of helps my family life is that I take that into our household too.
I'm never thinking that we're set and this is the way it's always gonna be.
It's always, what's the next thing that we need to be working on?
And as we enter new areas of discovery or challenge, learning is really a key set.
So let's take an example of, I think last year, maybe the year before, we did yet again another pass at our wills and our trusts and our estate planning.
Well, I'm not an estate planning expert by any stretch, but learning is a big part of it.
So instead of going into our estate planner and saying, you know, what do we need to do?
I had a basic idea of what we needed to do, to the point where we actually fired our first estate planner because she wasn't very good.
She didn't know what she was doing.
One of the deal breakers, not that anybody cares, was I asked her how she got to some planning numbers and she said, well, I just sort of followed the software.
And I'm like, well, I can follow the software.
I actually need somebody to look at our unique situation and understand it.
And I think when you have a learning mindset in your profession, if you can take that to your personal life, there's tons of areas that you're gonna apply that.
So yeah, so continuing ed and changing is a huge deal.
Yeah, I think that's sort of bring that into the home life.
Yeah, very nice.
Let's close this first segment with today's inked moments.
In this segment is where we share a memory from our past that's related to today's topic.
Today, how about we share a couple of milestones that you've celebrated in your career?
Sure, let's see.
I got two milestones that come to relevance here.
And the first one is the decision to move across the country.
So we talk about how do you manage dual careers, dual ambitions?
How do you set yourself up for success as a relationship, as a couple, professionally, personally?
And how do you deal with opportunities?
So we lived on the West Coast.
We talked about that in our very first episode.
Family was on the West Coast.
And the company I was working for got purchased by a company that was based on the East Coast.
And we were at kind of a crossroad.
And this was coming out, this was right after 9-11.
So this was when the economy and the country was sort of still in this panic and kind of uncertainty.
And I had what at the time was a pretty stable job.
I'd been doing, I'd come out of .com.
I'd been working for a tech company in Portland that started to struggle after 9-11 and was acquired by a bigger company.
So I had a decision to make.
I didn't lose my job as part of that.
They acquired us.
But the writing was on the wall that that regional office was going to get smaller.
So I was eventually going to have to either relocate or find another job.
And we had a decision point to make.
Do we relocate our family and try something new?
Or do I look for some different employment?
So I think one of the big milestones that in retrospect has set us up really well was we chose to uproot and move.
And that was a huge milestone in my career because it opened up a whole bunch of opportunities at a much larger company.
We'll get into this.
That leads to the second milestone, which is I've been with a company for 25 years, which pretty much nobody can say these days.
So if I was doing the exact same thing for 25 years, I wouldn't be at this company.
But hearkening back to an earlier answer, I've done probably four or five different jobs within this company.
It's a big enough organization and a big enough tent under which to find what you're excited about that I've been able to do multiple careers under one company.
Yet I've got 25 years of tenure at an organization, which is very unusual.
So I think that's a milestone I just passed that I don't think many employees are actually going to pass these days anymore.
It's 25 years of service for a single company.
And honestly, as I'm advocating or talking with our daughter who works in tech, I'm telling her she shouldn't be at a company for 25 years, because that's really not how you, I've been in a very unique situation with my company.
But I think if you really want to drive your career and get the most out of it financially and often professionally, 25 years at a single organization is not what you do.
So I would say very few people are going to hit that particular milestone again.
So yeah, those are the two milestones.
Yeah.
And you know, along those lines, your career, because you've been at the same place, is extremely stable.
And that has benefited our family in many ways.
Sure.
How about we talk about that a little bit?
So how has, not just the stability, but the flexibility of your job?
There's a reason I've been at my company for as long as I have been.
And a big part of that is, well, the term for it is work-life balance.
We'll go into a little bit more about, there is no such thing as work-life balance.
We'll talk about why I say that.
But one of the things that this company has afforded me is good, exciting work, the ability to drive into the areas that I'm passionate about and competent at and really can help the company at, but also a focus on getting work done, not how long are you at work.
And so that gives me the flexibility to manage when I do my work, how I get it done.
And as long as we're meeting our goals and our objectives, then they don't really care about that stuff.
And where that's really helped our family is we've mentioned before, we've got two adult daughters at this point.
Well, working for this company during their school years or during their formative years, I didn't have to miss sporting events.
I didn't have to miss many school performances.
I didn't have to worry about if I was on carpool duty or if I was taking kids in or if I had to leave early to pick them up, to transport them.
I had the flexibility with this organization to do that.
And that is a bit of a hallmark of this company, but it's also something you get by consistently meeting targets, meeting goals, being productive, right?
If you're a really solid contributor, then you get a little more flexibility.
So I think that's one of the benefits of a long study that maybe you sacrifice a little bit of professional advancement, but the trade-off in this situation was a ton of family flexibility.
Yeah, and along those lines, when the girls were born, I stepped away from my career, something we discussed at length, but you became the sole financial provider.
Let's talk about that a little bit.
And maybe that comes down to the balancing of the work and the family at that point.
Sure.
So what's your question?
Yeah, that happened.
Got a question about that?
How did moving from a dual income to a sole provider impact your career goals and your family interactions?
Right.
Okay, well, let's talk about it.
Let's talk about how we got to that decision, because I think that's something relationship-wise couples are going to have to deal with is how many kids when and what does it do to careers?
I think that's obviously something that happens, right?
And there is no single path through that.
I think it's a very personal decision on how you address that stuff.
And I think we often talk about the impact on the stay-at-home parent and what it might do to their career, but I don't know that we focus too much on the other side of that.
Let's say you are the sole earner.
What does that do to your career?
What does it change?
How does that change your dynamics around there?
So let's back up to maybe how we made that decision.
Okay, so we were, what, 25-ish when the girls were born?
26-ish?
Yes, you were 26, and I was just shy of 26, so.
Yeah, so we were in our mid-20s.
Pretty early on in careers.
You had just finished grad school.
I worked for a year.
Yeah, so like I just finished grad school, and obviously that's a huge time and energy, not a sacrifice, but you put a lot of time and energy to getting that degree, but you also put a lot of money into getting that degree, right?
So we came out with student debt.
We had those sort of things associated with that.
And so in a year, the ROI was not there.
You had not earned back anywhere near what we had put into that education, right?
So that's a pressure, right?
And I think, and I'll give you my remembering of this.
You give me your remembering of this, but we had our girls, again, twins.
Twins are insanely time-consuming, and a lot of energy goes in the first few months, a lot of energy.
And you had taken some maternity leave, and as you were nearing the end of your maternity leave, I'm pretty good at picking up subtleties, although I would argue that some of these were not that subtle, or comments about maybe being hesitant to go back to work, maybe not wanting to go back to work, or maybe worries about work.
And we hadn't even gotten to the point where I think we were lining up care and everything yet.
I think we were sort of in the phase of, hey, this is nearing.
And at one point, I think I had listened to it for quite a few comments in a row.
I just said, hey, are you even interested in going back?
Is this something you want to do?
And I think it took you a little bit of time to come to clarity, or at least communicate it clearly that you really didn't want to go back to work.
Is that your recollection of that?
Yes, the only thing I have to add there is there was also a tiny bit of a financial piece there.
In relation to the care of the girls, we had started looking at what it would take to put two infants into daycare, and a counselor, their first year out, before their license, doesn't make a whole lot.
We don't make a whole lot.
It's not, you don't jump into a six-figure career as a mental health counselor.
And so we looked at that, putting two in.
Maybe if it was only one infant, maybe it wouldn't make, but it was like, I'd only be bringing home a negligible amount after we paid for daycare.
And I was like, so do I only want to bring home a tiny bit of money and have somebody else, I know people go back to work and I respect that, but to have somebody else do the raising of them at that age for that amount.
Maybe I would have made a different decision if it- The dollars have been more.
Maybe, but I don't know that because I truly, it was hard, but I truly enjoyed being at home with the girls.
And I know some people, some women, especially, and men as well, but I've worked mainly with women that have had to make the decision that they don't want to stay home.
And that doesn't mean they don't love their children.
You know what, if they feel they'd be a better parent if they were working outside the home, because don't get me wrong, being a stay-at-home mom is work.
So working outside the home, if they think they'd be a better parent because they can give more, because they'll be in a better mental space to give to their children, then yeah, maybe they should work.
And so, but that wasn't the decision.
We discussed all of that.
All of that came into, and it was the, you know, the negatives didn't outweigh the positives.
Right, yeah, I forgot about the financial part of it, but that definitely was part of the calculus.
And that's a little bit of how we got to the sole earner, but what did that do to my career?
And what did that, how did that change how I approached my career?
I would say it did a couple things.
One, it made it a whole lot more important that I was good at it, and I held it, right?
So I think the pressure of being the sole financial piece is real, right?
I think we maybe take that for granted sometimes.
And when we focus on stay-at-home parents or a stay-at-home relationship, we really, you hear a lot about how the working spouse maybe doesn't carry their weight at home, right?
And that is true.
That's very much the case.
But I think we don't focus too much, often we don't focus enough on, well, how much extra burden are they carrying during the day to make sure that there's that steady income coming?
I think that is something you do carry, but it's just a different burden.
It's not more of a burden.
It's just a different burden, right?
The other piece of that is we downplay what you're missing.
And I think sometimes there's a conflict between if you cannot make all the things because of work, that you don't want to make all the things.
Those are not always the same thing.
Yeah, there's probably are times where like, okay, I'm okay not making that thing and I'll use work as a, yeah, I got work to do.
But more times than not, it's no, I got work to do.
And so I think balancing that, I need to spend this time, and we used the term earlier of work-life balance.
There are times, especially when you're a sole provider where there is no balance, where you have to work or you have to be at home.
And I think that all comes into how you address how I had to manage my career is there were times where I had to be unbalanced.
I had to be at work a lot more, busy seasons and that sort of stuff, or deadlines or whatever.
And, or travel, and travel's another big deal too.
There are a handful of times glazoned in my memory of being away and kids are sick.
And I think there was even hospital visits where you had to take them in the middle of the night.
And I'm 3000 miles away working and I can't do anything about it.
Or there's traveling and hurricanes coming.
That's another one.
I had to go work an event out of town and there's a hurricane coming toward us.
And their decision as a company was to get us out of here before the hurricane.
Ignore the fact that these are families at home in a hurricane.
So it's like not ideal, you know.
But when you're in a position of working for someone else and you're a sole earner, those things sort of change your equation, I guess.
But, I mean, it worked out fine for us.
There's, you know, the upside of that is that I've excelled in my career because I prioritize it, so.
Yeah, and absolutely, you talked about, you know, not having that, in the responsibility, I always felt, you know, since you were, I felt it was kind of a gift that I could stay home with the girls.
Because I know not everybody can do that.
You know, because their significant other doesn't, you know, they need the dual income.
And I viewed it as a gift.
So my goal, I wouldn't say I met this goal daily, but was to have a lot of things done before you got home.
Because I'm at the house, but obviously I'm taking care of two infants and then two toddlers and then two preschoolers.
But my, you know, I didn't want you to come home and the kitchen was a mess.
I didn't, I wanted the laundry to be done.
So I took over more of those kind of household chores, not, still didn't do, as in a previous episode, very allergic to grass, I don't do yard work.
But I didn't take over those things, but I tried to do other things so that you could focus.
But that, like I said, wasn't always successful.
I doubt every day you came home and the house was clean.
And there were some days, I tell the story all the time, which is you would, you told me, I can't remember exactly when it was, but you said you knew how bad my day had been if you walked through the door and all three of us were crying.
If it was just the girls crying, you're like, okay, it was not the best day.
But if they're crying and I was crying at the same time, when you walk through the door after work, you're like, oh, Melissa's had a bad day.
And you always jumped in because, you know, having the two infants, you need that extra step.
So I think there's, I don't want to call it a higher expectation, but I think it'd be quite rude for somebody to say, oh, I'm going to go watch some, you know, TV while you and the kids cry.
You know, you didn't do that.
You came and took a kid and I took the other one, or you took them both, and I would go and just, I'll go start dinner while I'm crying.
And so I think there's that, there was the inequity there, but to me it was, it was okay because you were doing, you were, oh gosh, the feminist will hate me, but you were putting food on the table.
I was not, but what I was doing at home was enabling you to, anyway, all of that stuff.
So I think this will lead into something we'll talk about, which is when you have a sole earner, and we talked about this last episode about communicating expectations around household chores or financial earning or career, like all those sort of things.
And I think one of the things we did pretty good is we communicated around those things.
What were the expectations?
And yeah, there's no arguing that you took up more of the home stuff.
And you can say you should because you stay at home, or not, not everybody does, because to your point, taking care of children is full-time work as well.
The extra things you took on during the day are the equivalent to the extra things that I would take on after work, right?
I mean, I think it's all about finding that balance.
But I think the reason, the way it worked for us is we didn't keep score on those sort of things.
It wasn't something where, oh, I did these five things, so you need to do those five things.
It was these 10 things needed to get done.
And so today you did six and I did four, or today you did nine and I did one.
But next time, I did eight and you did two.
And I think those all added up to 10 in the end, which was really what we were going for.
Keeping score on those things is where you get into problems.
I think for us, we did a pretty solid job of there's the end point.
Here are the things that need to get done to get to that end point.
Be that enough money for food on the table, or be that actually a clear table to sit at.
Take whatever, however you wanna do that, right?
But those are all parts of getting our kids to where they needed to be and getting us to where we needed to be.
So yeah, I mean, I think not perfect day-to-day on that, but in the big picture, pulling the same way and having the same goal is what lets you get to the end of those things.
Absolutely, and so chronologically speaking, because you kind of got us there, which is once the girls were established in school, I decided to resume my career.
Actually, not right away.
If you remember, for two years, I did substitute teaching, but I only did it at the girls' school.
So they went to a magnet school, so the bus service would have taken them over an hour to get there, so I just drove them, but it was 18 miles.
So I figured, well, if I'm driving them 18 miles to go to school, I might as well work a day and get paid for it.
And so for a year, a year and a half, I did substitute teaching, but then I decided, okay, the girls, they don't need me at school.
They're older now, they can ride the bus, or we can do carpool or whatever.
And so I went back to work.
That was another transition in our relationship.
Now we were trying to balance the girls, plus two careers, and staying connected as a family.
What is your memory of my return to work?
What impact on your work and home did that have?
Yeah, so to clarify, when I said the teaching was a train wreck, I didn't mean you teaching is a train wreck.
I meant substitute teaching is a train wreck.
The stories you would come home with, comical, and I think the positive non-Southern term is bless your heart, like as in, not the Southern bless your heart of, and research that if you need to know the difference between a Southerner saying bless your heart and somebody else saying bless your heart.
And I think, just like I couldn't do your counseling work, no way could I do substitute teaching.
Now I've coached a bunch, and the coaching interaction is similar yet different because of the environment, but the substitute teaching, oh man.
It's hard stuff.
That was miserable, and I wasn't even doing it.
That's what I meant by, that's what I meant.
I don't know why you internalize the criticism to you immediately.
I don't know, that's a really good question.
Maybe we should explore that.
We should dig into that, yeah, exactly.
Not today though, we've got other things to cover.
But yes, down the road, we can explore that.
Yeah, let's see.
What were some of the highlights that I remember of you, or things I remember about you stepping back into the profession?
Well, beyond the obvious, it was about time, which is probably the rude way of saying, thank God you're going back to work and regaining your career, because we invested a lot of time, energy, and resources in you getting your credentials and all that sort of stuff.
So like seeing you go back and do what you wanted to do from a professional standpoint.
Yeah, that was great about time, in a positive way.
The joking way is about time, because man, it would bring in some more money, which would be nice.
So I think that was probably both of those.
So I think I was an advocate of you doing that for multiple reasons.
Super thankful you'd gotten the girls all the way to where they were, awesome.
Like, I mean, I think their future success was laid on that foundation, no doubt about it.
So that's awesome, that was all good.
But it was time to get back to some of your, we'll call them personal goals.
They were still family goals.
They were still couples goals, some of your personal goals, because there was a reason you went and got all that schooling.
There was a reason you had done all the work to get yourself in position.
So it was great to see you going back to do that.
But did it mean changes?
Yeah, it meant changes.
It meant, I'm pretty sure it meant that I alluded to being on carpool duty earlier and that sort of stuff.
I don't think I was on carpool duty until you started going back to work.
And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, I got morning commute to get the kids to school, right?
Because you had now a work schedule.
Or I had afternoon pickups, which by the way, I'll take morning drop-offs over afternoon pickups any day of the week.
But, so yeah, so I think it changed the actual dynamics of household responsibilities.
Who's taking the kids where, right?
And I remember that being a deal.
I remember not early on for the substitute teaching, but as you started getting back into your professional career and eventually started positioning yourself for your private practice, I think there was a lot of support needed from me to help you navigate that.
I think that goes back to some of those big learnings that had to happen.
What are the legal things that need to be done?
What does this mean from an accounting standpoint, a CPA, a business structure?
What does this mean for running my accounts?
What does this mean for billing?
What does this mean for various things and marketing and getting clients and those sort of things?
And you have a passion for the counseling piece, but the business piece was something we worked on a little bit more together.
You obviously did the majority of it.
I just helped along the way.
So I think that was part of it, some additionals there.
I think it did give me an opportunity to be a little more directly involved with the girls' activities and stuff, right?
So that was a positive element.
I don't think it impacted my work at all, again, because I had a lot of flexibility with my work.
And so, yeah, I mean, I remember maybe taking more calls on the road than I would sitting in my office, but it didn't stop anything.
So yeah, I think those are my recollections of it.
Did that get to your question?
It, yeah, it definitely did.
And there's- Were you even listening to my answer?
Of course I was.
Did you know what it was?
I do, but you know, I do believe that's where the flexibility really showed itself.
Sure.
Because as a mental health therapist, you can't take a call during, I never answer my, my phone is turned off during a session.
So if you have an emergency, you're out of luck.
And so they, you were the primary, once I resumed my counseling career, you were the primary contact from the school.
And so if somebody got sick, they didn't call me, they called you, because I'm not gonna answer, whereas you could.
Right, yep.
It wasn't always convenient, but you could leave work.
And so that's one of the things I really, so I, I've always loved your career because it's been so flexible, it's been so stable, that honestly, it's allowed me to kind of play around a little bit, you know?
Worked for agencies for a while before starting my, and then starting my practice, because I took a pay cut that year, because I had to establish my own clients, I couldn't take from where I was working.
And so, and, but your stability in your job, so I've always really appreciated that, that when I went back, I could do it 100%, because I knew I'd back up.
You know, I still, I think I did typically the drop-offs, because I usually didn't start till late.
I worked with kids at that time, and so I was doing after-school appointments, so you did a lot of the after-school kind of stuff.
Early on.
Yeah, because I just wasn't available.
And so.
It's funny, you mentioned being the point of contact.
I think that's why, still on my phone, they come through my contacts.
So like, I don't ever silence my phone for the girls, and a couple key numbers, and they're there, so I think that's probably still legacy of all that, of like, I don't care if I'm in a meeting, that's gotta come through, yeah.
You're it.
Yeah, I think there was twice.
Yes, in my entire career, where I, because you couldn't do something.
There was an emergency eye doctor appointment, and so I had to cancel a client 30 minutes before an appointment.
Oh yeah, I was traveling.
And I have never done that before.
Ah!
But.
I was in Las Vegas working an event.
But it worked just fine, and I took care of it.
And then, just recently, the snow we had when we had that appointment up in Virginia, I canceled the date.
Those are the only two times in my, I've been in private practice, in two weeks it'll be 14 years.
There's only twice I've had to cancel, because you weren't available to do something.
That's huge.
Now that you say that out loud, that's a big deal.
Yeah, I mean, that does harken back to the, there are more benefits to working for a company than just pure financial.
And so, the work environment that I've been in for 25 years has been flexible enough to accommodate that stuff, for sure.
Yeah, that's a very big piece of it.
You mentioned something about, so Taylor, our daughter who just got married, we were talking at one point, and we were talking, we'll call it philosophical sort of topics and ranges and stuff.
And I had asked her some question.
I don't know how it led to it, but she was talking about her view of what you and I have done for her, for them, raising her and Alexa.
And she used a backstop metaphor that I thought was really pretty good, and you sort of just alluded to it as well.
And one of the areas that I take a lot of pride in is that you and I for the girls, but me for you has been a backstop.
And what I mean by that is, you and I have put a foundation behind them that they can launch and go and try whatever they want to, because even if it doesn't work and they're gonna backslide, they're only gonna come back so far because we're here and stable for them, and we're sort of the backstop.
And Taylor made some comment that it's allowed her to try a few things in her career or her personal life or relation with friends that she might not have tried if she didn't have that backstop.
And so I think when you're talking about your career, that's another benefit of my real stable positive career is that you can go try whatever you want to.
And yeah, I mean, it hurts if there's financial consequences of it, or it hurts, obviously, if there's professional relationship, but it doesn't end us, it just hurts.
It doesn't, it's not critical.
So I thought that was an interesting metaphor, analogy.
One of those two things that she communicated that sort of resonated.
Yeah, I wonder, that might've, this might be the first time I heard that discussion, possibly.
Could be, I think I've told you that before.
It was in relation to some of the design work on my tattoo, which we'll get into at some point.
Yeah, it is kind of tied into the name of our podcast, so.
Right, exactly, yeah, and yeah.
And my tattoos are all about family, so there's definitely family and relationship.
Right.
Stuff that'll come out of it.
Right.
Is that foreshadowing for future episodes?
There you go.
Good work.
All right, what you got?
So we're getting close to our closing segment, but before we get there, let's talk about how our career differences have strengthened our relationship.
You know, different skills coming together and whatnot.
Empathy, communication, respect.
Or do you feel we've covered all that already?
You're talking about my career, because I have empathy and communication and respect, or are you, are you, are you claiming, are you claiming that?
Those have strengthened our relationship.
Well, one of those was tech expertise.
Are you trying to claim that one now, too?
No, that one is all you, and something I, I don't know where that was supposed to fall in our interview today, but something I've, is, I'm very appreciative of.
I am not tech savvy, but I, tech is involved in my job.
I do virtual, I do telehealth, telebehavioral health, technically.
And that, that's a platform that's, you know, in figuring out my lighting when I went totally virtual.
Well, I have really appreciated those kinds of things.
So anyway, I was going to throw that in at some point.
I don't remember when, so there we have it.
I love how you're not reading your note cards.
It's this exact question on your note cards, which is comical.
And you know that in sessions, I refer, whenever I have a glitch with a, with a client session, I go, I'll take that up with tech support later.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't say tech support's my husband.
Yeah.
But I just say, you know what?
I'll talk to tech support and see if that's on my end.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so you get mentioned in my sessions.
You just don't know it.
Tech support.
I actually knew that.
You've told me that before.
Oh, how silly.
Yes, we, we bring very different skill sets from our professional life.
And I alluded to it a little bit earlier around the education part.
But there are, there are some things that, that my career affords me that directly impact our relationship.
So technical expertise, yeah, of course.
I mean, if you need technical support in the house, it's me.
If it's the gadgets, that sort of stuff.
And I mean, fine, okay, that's part of my career.
But I think one of the other things that, by the nature of, I work in communications, and I work in social media to some extent.
I work YouTube a lot.
And I have sort of a inquisitive mindset.
I don't, I don't just hear things and sort of stop on them.
I like to dig a little bit deeper on those.
I like to go more than just surface level.
And if you harken back to the last episode, when we were talking about our walks and some of the things we talk about, I often am encouraging you to stay up on current events in certain areas.
And we've gotten a lot better over the last, I'd say four or five years, where you're not hearing things two days later and asking me, hey, did you hear about it?
And I'm like, oh my gosh, I mean.
Yeah, yeah, and you're, with your daily routine, you're not as much up on current events and news and trends and those sort of things, in some ways.
You are in other ways because of your profession and what the trends are there.
But as far as what's going on in the world, let's say, or what's going on in tech, or what's going on in certain industries that might be of impact to you, the nature of my job is I'm up on a lot of those things.
So the move to telehealth is a great example of that.
When COVID was all starting to fire up before any lockdowns or anything, I had already started talking to you.
Like, hey, I'm hearing this that doesn't, I don't like what I'm hearing.
And I think you should start positioning yourself to work remotely, right?
And I, and then as it got closer, I said to you, and we're not preppers by any stretch, but I said, hey, I think if you need to order some meds and secure some food and start stocking up on a few things, I think now's the time to do it.
Because if it's true or not, it doesn't really matter.
A sort of panic is starting to set in, and I think we're gonna be impacted by this.
So it allowed us to get ahead of a few of those things and be a little more ready.
And you, I think you were down for less than a week when you flipped from not seeing people in person to.
Actually, no, I was not because you got me set up.
But the funny thing is I had started training for telehealth because I'd heard about, I thought that would be a good supplement to my work, to have a hybrid situation.
And so I started training back in the summer, but you started getting me ready.
And my message to you was do it now as it got closer.
I already had half my training done, but you helped me with this.
You said, hey, this is coming.
Let's get your, let's get an off.
And so what happened is actually I had somebody that day call and say they weren't feeling well.
So that very day, it was March 18th.
I remember it.
And he said, it wasn't feeling well.
I said, let's do video.
And we just went straight to that.
And so, yeah, that was my March 17th and was my last day in the office.
And then March 18th, I just went, and that's because I had already started the training.
So I knew that piece, which you didn't have to have at the beginning of the pandemic.
They waived so many different rules, but I was pleased that I was already.
And so I finished my training within a week, but you had me all set up technically.
And I wouldn't have had that.
Yes, I think that's an example of just by the nature of my profession and stuff, just being a little more aware of what's going on and being able to bring that in.
There are also, you know, all the skills of having to continually learn all adapt to this.
And then I work in communications.
So we talked a lot about the role that communication has played for us and transparency.
I do a lot of project management.
I do a lot of explaining technical things to non-technical people or taking non-technical requests and explaining it to technical people.
So my communication skills are pretty good.
Honestly, if I was to say what's made me successful in my career, it's what I just said there.
I can speak with both technical and non-technical people.
And that is something that our daughter, Alexa, is finding out that she's really good at as well.
And it's also why she is being very successful in her early career, because she can talk to people who have really incredible technical knowledge and she can translate it to people who don't.
And she can do the exact opposite.
She has to take a very non-technical question and she can break it down for someone who needs to implement it and let them understand what they're really asking for.
So that communication piece is something that definitely helps in relationships as well, because that's very transferable.
And it might not be technical to non-technical, but it might be counselor speak to what the trends are out there.
Or it might be financial speak to someone who doesn't really have an affinity for math or those sort of things.
Yeah.
Did you want to talk about how combining our resources once I went back to work allowed us to view every dollar earned as family money to which we would apply goals?
Or do you view it that way?
No, I mean, yes.
And I'll clarify your question there, because I don't think you read your notes right.
Well, I tried to make them more concise and I might've left out some key words.
Well, the way you just asked that made it sound like we combined when you went back to work.
No, no, we were combined to start.
Yes, absolutely.
So when we became a sole earner, it never was your money or my money.
It was always our money.
And so we've always viewed household tasks.
We've always viewed finances.
We've always viewed goals as our goals, our house, our finances.
And so our pot of money shrunk when you stopped working.
Our pot of money increased when you went back to work.
So I would say nothing really changed except the amount of dollars we were working with.
And I think that is another reason why combining your finances, which we will super deep dive into in an episode because this is a very, I'll call it controversial just because lots of people talk about it.
For me, it's not controversial at all.
There is an optimal way to do it and there's a non-optimal way.
It just depends what your goals are.
But I think if you're talking about how do you manage dual professional lives, which is the whole focus of today, and if you keep your finances separate, then the stresses on you when you stopped working would be wildly different than they were because it was a family stress.
It wasn't a you stress.
And when you went back to work, it wasn't a you benefit.
It was a us benefit.
Our pot got bigger.
Our goals became more achievable quicker.
So I would say it didn't change anything except the amount of money we had to work with was less.
Yeah, and that is a very good point because I wasn't saying we just combined finances because we definitely from day one.
Yeah, that's why I commented it was a note card reading.
I knew what the question was.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, day one we didn't have much, so it was easy.
Yeah, and we were in fine shape when you stopped working, but we still had student debt.
We had mortgage debt.
We had car debt, I think, still at that point.
I mean, we were young.
We were 20.
I think I was able to because I went on maternity and everything, and oh, we haven't gone into that, but I was on bedrest as well because the pregnancy was difficult.
I actually was able to defer my loans.
So we weren't paying them at the time.
Yeah, which was a terrible decision.
But they still sat there.
Oh, and they grew.
Right?
They grew significantly.
Deferring your loans is a terrible thing.
Well, you know what, at the time, I think that's what we were advised to do, and.
Okay, so this goes back to mistakes you make in your life around finances because you don't know things because you, I mean, because you're ignorant in an area.
It doesn't mean you're dumb.
It's just you just don't know it.
You don't know the details of it.
Yeah, we deferred the heck out of those loans, and we ended up paying probably, we'll just say tens of thousands of dollars more because of those decisions where, you know, it was just, it wasn't financially wise.
We didn't learn that lesson for quite a few years later, though.
Yeah, we were just like, oh.
We should've learned that one earlier.
You know, 500 lesson bills every month?
Sure, let's see.
Great, sold, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Now we can get the car payment on that expedition that we really didn't need that was like, yeah.
No, he just.
He was a beast.
Yeah, those are financial mistakes that we'll have to add those to the financial discussion that we talk about.
We don't learn from those, and I don't.
Well, some people do.
That's a very good point.
Okay, let's defer that.
Some people don't learn from those.
Defer to a future episode that we will talk to that.
Before we get to our final segment, our pen to paper, is there anything that I didn't ask that you, wow, I see this in therapy, too, when I get to the end of a first appointment.
Is there anything I didn't ask that you want to make sure that we covered today?
Relating to this topic.
Relating to this topic.
I think the, no, I mean, my career does not directly tie into our relationship, but it does, it has afforded us a lot of freedom in our relationship, freedom in our family that's been really good.
The thing that I think a lot of people have to come to grips with and be really clear on is there will always be imbalance in your life.
There will always be times where you are more one thing than the other.
And I think we've done a good job of finding work-life balance over the long haul, not the short haul, right?
There are times where we're just wildly unbalanced, but our goal is to be in balance over the long haul.
And I think we've gotten a lot better at when we're on vacation, we're on vacation, and that's family, and that's where we find our balance back, but when we're working on our careers, we dive in and we work really hard.
And I think a lot of people could benefit from that, and we've been pretty fortunate with that.
That's pretty good.
You want me to do the close?
Sure thing.
Thanks for listening along with this.
We've listened to the first few episodes.
You know that we always like to close with a little bit of guidance, maybe a recommendation, something we think that you might want to explore or apply to your relationship around today's topic.
We call this segment Pen to Paper.
So today we've talked about my career and the differences that our professions have brought to our relationship.
And today we're going to give you a practical takeaway, and we're going to focus it around supporting your partner's ambition.
We talked a lot in a previous episode about communication.
And if you're going to have success in whatever area it is with your relationship, you need to be clear about your hopes, dreams, goals, ambitions, expectations, whatever words you want to throw on there.
This is no different when it comes to what are your individual career goals?
What are your family goals?
How do you see those playing out?
Now, we're not saying you should have every possible relationship discussion before you really commit in, but you should have some guidance on this.
And for us, building our careers was important.
The timing on how those careers got built sort of changed as we had kids.
But it's always been something that we were real clear that we were both going to work, and that was going to be, it was important to us.
You might have a different dynamic in your relationship.
You might find out that one of you desperately wants to be a stay-at-home caregiver, or career is not important at all to you.
You're just one of J-O-B that pays bills.
But just be very clear about what those things are.
We've also discussed a couple areas of imbalance, because imbalance will happen.
We had two big periods of imbalance in ours.
One was when I transitioned to being the sole financial earner, and one was when we transitioned out, and you went back to work.
Those really changed the requirements around the house.
They've changed the requirements around the professions.
And they were definitely times where we communicated and said, hey, what's best for not just the family, but what's best for you and I, and what's best for me individually or you individually?
And we'd really just talked about those things to make sure we were sort of in line with those things.
The more intentionally you can be with those, the better.
So in this segment, we encourage you to communicate with your partner, just in case you didn't catch that from the whole lead-in there, about your ambitions.
What are they for your career?
What are they for your family?
Discuss your vision, map it out, how you're gonna support each other.
Know that there will be times of imbalance, and discuss how you intend to face those times together.
One of the things I think we've always been very good at is it's you and I versus whatever the goal is, whatever the challenge is, whatever the ambition is.
But it's always done in a framework of what's best for you and I. And then by extension, what's best for our family, because what's best for you and I is by definition gonna be best for our family.
So, I think that's it.
Anyone wanna add there?
No.
All right.
Well, I think that brings us to the end of this.
Hmm, what are we talking about next time, do you know?
I always do this right at the end.
Oh, we just briefly talked about it.
Blanking, blanking.
We gotta get better at previewing the next episode, because- Well, you know, maybe it keeps them on the edge of their seats.
No, we wanna tell them so they come back.
We wanna tell them next time we'll be talking about- Do you want me to look it up?
No.
Ready to close?
Yes.
All right.
So, thank you for joining us on this episode of Pendant Inc.
We appreciate you spending your time coming and joining our community.
If you have any comments to share, feedback, if this brought up any issues or questions or things you'd like us to explore and dig further into, if you've had your own struggles or successes with dual professions and how it has impacted your relationship, share those in the comments.
Give us a like, follow us, subscribe, do all those awesome things that let us know that you're out there and listening and that give us inspiration for our next episodes.
With that, we're out.
All right.
Thank you, everyone.
Take care.