Fuel up your Relationship Mindset

When I invited Sammi Jaeger to be a guest on the podcast, I knew that she was bringing relationship mindset GOLD to the table.

Sammi is a multi-passionate entrepreneur with an amazingly generous spirit. In the podcast we focussed on her business that she has with her husband Nathan - Fuel Collective. The intention is that they empower couples to create a really thriving relationship, something that happens by design, and not by default. The business idea started when they were in their late 20s and had already been married for five years. A whole heap of their mates were going through really horrible breakups, and in some cases divorce with people that they thought with their forever person. What they realised was that there's not a lot of relationship education that takes place, at school or in while you're at university. So if you've been brought up in a home environment, that you're not really that keen on replicating, or you've never really seen a healthy, happy, thriving relationship modelled to you, where do you learn that?

They went and did a whole lot of market research, and really couldn't find very much for, "hey, you found your person, you're in a great place, but you want to keep it there". There's quite a bit of stuff for couples who have like the shine has worn off, or it's no longer meeting their expectations, but not for how to actually build those relationship skills.

For Sammi "it has been such an incredible learning experience, not just about business, but learning about a lot more about each other and our working styles as well". She shared that one of the big things has been having very clear responsibilities and tasks. "We kind of nipped it in the bud pretty quickly, we want to know who's going to take responsibility and accountability for stuff so that we can both work more autonomously". They also put a strong focus on leveraging each other's skills and strengths. Nathan is an electrical engineer, a really methodical and very process driven person - so he's been so great at creating things like checklists, and for not just them, but their team. Whereas Sammi excels at creating relationships and meeting the people that they need to meet to create partnerships or to create opportunities for podcast guests or PR. 

"That comes really naturally to me, whereas it doesn't for Nate. So we've made a really conscious effort to leverage the things that we are both good at and enjoy, and not trap either of us in stuff that is not fun" - Sammi

Another tip she shared is to value each other's time. Right at the beginning, when they launched the podcast, they were doing absolutely everything themselves. Nathan was spending upwards of 5 hours a week edit audio editing a 30 minute episode which provided a great learning experience but was not a great use of his time. So they decided it was time to outsource find someone who could support them and get the quality without it sucking up so much time.

Sammi shared, "we were buying back, what turned out to be a night a week or half day on a weekend".

The couple also have boundaries around creating permission to talk shop. So if they are out at dinner, or lying in bed, someone has to consciously say, "Hey, do you mind if we talk shop for a minute?". I loved this one because I know as someone who runs businesses with their parter it can creep in and take over everything if you don't have those boundaries.

For more relationship mindset tips, listen to the full episode here.

To download free resources from the Fuel Collective visit www.fuelcollective.com.au/freebies