August is Black Business Month, and an estimated 43 percent of small businesses are family-owned.
A lot of career competition in a relationship stems from the fear of what others think. “People will see me as riding his coattails if he makes it and I don’t.” Or “People will wonder what someone as successful as that is doing with a nobody like me.” Terrible thoughts like those. Banish those thoughts. Remember that even if you were incredibly successful, there would still be haters and gossips. You need to learn to block them out, no matter where you’re at in your career. All that matters is how you and your partner feel about each other.
Your man may decide that it’s his friend group that is holding him back. Maybe he has some friends who are settled in their careers—they make decent money at jobs they don’t love but don’t hate, and are just enjoying a calm, simple life. But your man may decide he needs only and exclusively super-ambitious people around him, and start making some friendship cuts.
When something great happens to you and you tell your partner about it, you’re surprised to find that he belittles the accomplishment. You may tell him that a certain publication is writing about you and he’ll say something like, “That one’s just online, right?” or “That’s only published in our town, right, nowhere else?” Why does he hone in on the negative?
On double dates, the other couples take an interest in a project you are working on. They want to pitch ideas to you. They think it is fascinating. Even though you told your partner it would not be all work talk tonight, you cannot resist the attention. This double date just became a brainstorming session for your work.
When I tell friends I’m going on vacation in a certain destination, they start telling me about the people I should meet up with there who would help my career and the convention I should drop into that pertains to my industry. I’m going on vacation. I want to disconnect from work for a bit.
He often finishes your stories about work for you. You’re in the middle of a story that you think has plenty of great twists and turns. He cuts you off, and just jumps to the end.
Hey, the world will provide you plenty of competition, adversaries, challengers, and doubters. I promise you that. You won’t be short on people who push you by doubting you. So, you don’t need that dynamic within your romantic relationship.
You’re bound to have moments of, “Is this even the person I married anymore?” You may not have realized, until now, how much you subconsciously tied up this man’s career with his identity. And now that the former is shifting, it can feel like the latter is shifting.
In order to prove it wasn’t nepotism, you’ll have to work four times as hard as anyone else in your position would. It can be exhausting. But it’s the only way to earn your peers’ respect.
Sometimes our schedules are so conflicting, and our sleep schedules are even more conflicting, that we look at our calendars and say, “Alright well, I guess I’ll see you next week.” But we live together.
Everyone lets ego get the best of them from time to time when they’re killing it in their careers. We can become self-involved, narcissistic, always wanting to talk about our success and work, and believing that our career is the most important and interesting topic available. Perhaps more than, say, how our partner’s kickball game went or how his trip was to visit his college friend.