Establishing A Collaborative Partnership

I’m a big believer in collaborative partnership

Relationships should help emancipate us from our small self to your bigger self. They make us better people than they found us.
You have to listen to the wisdom and guidance behind a partner’s complaints to see how they’re standing for your growth.
In the newsletter, I mentioned that I didn’t think I’d be the woman who would go into business with her husband and thrive. I also lowkey think I married someone VERY different from me and who is the ying to my yang because I wanted partnership not necessarily a business partner. But over the years, I’ve become more confident about my business partnerships with my husband, Neo. One of those business partnerships also happens to be our marriage. We had a discussion about this. The love, the light and the business transaction that is marriage. We had to be real about that.
He approaches things VERY differently than I do, but what we remain solid on and refer back to continuously is that we have the same end in mind. We have the same vision. We are both conscious about giving and getting. We are conscious about the wisdom and understanding that love requires of us.
We may not be on the same page on how to get there, but the bigger picture is clear.

The need for affirmation

When I met my husband the things I wanted (and most often we do this as women) were more about affirmation – much like how little girls look at their dads with hope and wait for him to say, “My beautiful girl!”

Your father is the first person in your life that offers you the wisdom and guidance to self-actualize and that is why we ultimately marry our fathers I guess. Unfortunately, we cannot choose our fathers. But, we can choose our partners if we learn certain healthy ways to filter some of the toxicity. But, this isn’t the point of this blog. We are talking partnering here.

The important part in partnering is to listen to the wisdom and guidance in the way they react and how they speak when they are not happy with something you have done or said.

I study the teachings of many relationship coaches, and apply their doctrine and do believe in true love and perfect partnership and I also believe that we need to stop romanticising love and perfection in partnerships. There’s a term I recently learnt; it’s called “The White Light of Love”.

Think Light & Love – Light being the energy and frequency of wisdom and love being the energy and vibration of creation.

So, the next time you hear or send someone light and love, you are essentially sending the, the energy and frequency of creation and wisdom.

Stop romanticising love and partnership

When we stop romanticizing love and partnership and start seeing it through the lens of drawing nearer to “The White Light of Love”, we start being more conscious of what we are giving and getting.

When a rainbow is created, light enters a water droplet, slowing down and bending as it goes from air to denser water. The light reflects off the inside of the droplet, separating into its component wavelengths or colours. When light exits the droplet, it makes a rainbow. When we experience the white light of love, it is to experience what love does to us, experiencing the full spectrum of a rainbow and the full spectrum of human emotions; accepting and acknowledging the positive emotions like love, faith, trust, joy and accepting and acknowledging negative emotions like anger, fear, jealousy, etc.

Whether in romantic relationship or a human relationship or partnership, one needs to accept and experience these feelings AND raising the ability to feel the next persons feelings whilst empathizing and not judging.

HUMANITY.

I love it when Sarah Jakes-Roberts says, “I did not fall in love. I stood in love”

So, here’s the thing. To stand in love, you need to stand. You need to learn to stand by yourself first and be even more firm and picky with who stands next to you. If you are to offer yourself to someone, you have to build yourself up first, so they don’t tip you over and you don’t overwhelm them with your own weight to stand.

Here are my tips on partnering in business and life:

Identify the shared goals and values

Build yourself up to stand so you don’t fall for just about anything. Self-work is so important here. When you know what your values and your goals are, you are able to marry the shared ones.

Clarity of vision

This is one of the biggest issues that can tear a partnership apart whether romantic or not.

Just like any marriage or romantic relationship, making sure that you’re on the same page is absolutely key to a maintaining a healthy and happy coexistence whether in business or in love. Ask anyone who’s had a long marriage and they’ll tell you: You simply have to make time for each other and get to know each other beyond the work.

In business, it sets the foundation that determines how well you’ll do in the long term and in relationships. It sets the foundation for learning and finding the white light. Hear the good and the bad. Share the successes and celebrate them and also listen for the frustrations. The most important here for me is where there is love in wisdom and understanding, you have to listen to what is not being said too. And then respond to it in wisdom and understanding.

Divide the work

Analysis of strengths is so important here. Know your capacity/bandwidth and know your strengths and weaknesses. Know where you actually make a tangible difference and add value. No matter how much you love a person and how much you are so drawn to them, understand that in business, you have to divide work and not leave gaping holes where things need to be done. You cannot be stepping on each other’s toes.

Trust each other

In most business ventures that having taken off, I have found that trust is the issue in most cases. When you have been hurt a lot and often, trust is something that you, not the other person, and only you need to work on. No one should be responsible for your lack of trust and equally, in the journey of self-love and self-care, building yourself up to stand should come with the responsibility to be trusted. Are you trustworthy? Are one of your values “trust and loyalty”?

Make Time

My husband, being my business associate, and I set aside one day a week to go somewhere and just catch up and enjoy a good lunch that turns into dinner, and feel human in the manic pace of work we find ourselves in. Even when you feel as though there isn’t anything to talk about, create a flow and routine about having a catch-up session, have an agenda and flow from there.

It’s okay to walk away, but don’t burn bridges

This I wish I’d known at a younger age. Remember in some cases, it isn’t personal even when it feels like it. Just because a partnership didn’t work, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. When something happens, flip the table and sit on the givers end (once again, wisdom and understanding), and as tough as that is, try empathise with where they are coming from. Then when the anger and frustration has died down and you’ve blown off some steam, stay in touch, checkup and stay abreast of things. You never know what the future holds and how perhaps different ways of working together may develop in future.