Daily Inspiration: Meet Meredith & Craig

Today we’d like to introduce you to Meredith & Craig

Hi Meredith & Craig, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Absolutely. We were living a very “normal” life, checking all those boxes that society taught us to check: get good grades, get a good job, get promotions, get married, buy a house, save for retirement… check check check check. We were doing the “stable” corporate career thing and making our families very proud. But… there was something missing for both of us. We both enjoyed the success we were having, each climbing the corporate ladder, but we both felt like we had more to offer the world than we were in our jobs.

We actually worked for the same company – it’s how we met, at a retirement party for some colleagues. It’s interesting because neither of us planned to attend that event. But something pulled us, separately, to go. We both listened to our gut and went. And it changed everything. Our relationship blossomed from there.

Years later (we were married at this point), the company decided to close our office, and we were faced with a very stressful decision: Move across the country to keep our jobs or leave the company. It felt like a gut punch.

Amazingly, at the same time, Meredith’s dad was diagnosed with cancer, and we thought it would be his last Christmas, so we drove 17 hours (each way) to spend Christmas with Meredith’s family. (Spoiler: it wasn’t his last Christmas; we ended up having four more years with him after that). But that situation gave us the perspective we needed to make that really difficult decision. On that trip, we decided NOT to move across the country, further from our family and friends, and instead, we decided to bet on ourselves and jump out of the proverbial airplane and figure out how to build a parachute on the way down.

Leaving the only life we’d ever known, a life that we were very good at, was really scary but somehow, despite all the fear, discomfort, it felt like the right decision for us. So we left to become entrepreneurs.

Today, we’re relationship coaches. We’ve seen firsthand over and over again that a thriving relationship is the cheat code in your life. When you’re no longer spending time, energy and focus walking on eggshells, arguing, avoiding arguments, constantly repairing your relationship, then you have all of that time, energy and focus to redirect toward your goals in the other areas of your life, like your health, your business, your family. And your partner has all that energy, time and focus too – it creates an exponential energy shift towards your goals, enabling you to level up every other area of your life – your health, your business, everything!

We’ve helped so many couples do exactly that, through our 12-week Exponential Relationship Program. It’s a fabulous program, that is transformative and we’re really proud of it. We also offer some limited private relationship coaching for couples as well.

But relationship coaching is so much more than marriage coaching. There are so many important relationships in your life, and the same skills and strategies improve all of them – it’s often just easier to start with your marriage. To help people transform ALL of the relationships in their life so they can live a life that they love – we have the Infinite Relationship Mastermind where we help people level up EVERY important relationship in their life: the relationship with themselves, with their spouse, with their business partner, with their kids, their parents… even the relationships with their health, stress, conflict, fear, energy, the future, fun and so many more. The mastermind has been really fun because it has allowed us to help so many more people. It’s a really fabulous community who all lean in and support each other. We’re incredibly proud of it and really protective of it. Not just anyone can join, you have to apply to be a member so that we maintain the safe space we’ve all created to level up our lives.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We’d love to be able to tell you that we left our corporate careers and started relationship coaching and it was all smooth sailing. But that isn’t even close to what happened.

Even though we are both very planful people, we made the decision to leave our corporate careers, without a plan. We started researching how to replace our corporate income, quickly, and learned that ‘90% of millionaires made their money in real estate’. That was good enough for us. Real estate it is! We jumped in and started a real estate investing company to replace our corporate income. We ended up HATING that business. It felt like we were back at our corporate jobs, but this time, without the benefit of the six-figure paychecks.

As it turns out, that business didn’t align with our purpose or the vision we had for our future, and most importantly, it was negatively impacting our relationship.

But the thing was – we hadn’t done the work to identify our purpose or our vision for the future. We didn’t know yet what we wanted. Eventually, we had a difficult conversation about how we were both feeling about the decision we made. We decided that it was us – our marriage, above everything. During that conversation, we made the decision to shut down the real estate investing company – even after investing a lot of money into a business coach, a website, marketing materials, etc. Our relationship comes first.

We learned 3 lessons in that failed business: 1) Don’t chase money. When you do, it tends to run away. 2) Our relationship is the most important thing, it’s our superpower. 3) We had lost a big part of our identity leaving the corporate life and we needed to rediscover who we were, who we wanted to be and how we wanted to contribute to the world.

We made the difficult decision to not focus on replacing our corporate income and instead focus on ourselves, our marriage and our personal growth and we embarked on a journey to figure out who we were and who we wanted to be and ultimately what we wanted to do. That journey led us through all kinds of different events, retreats, and workshops. And as we attended these events, we met a lot of people and many would ask us about our story and ask us for advice in their marriage, and we would be happy to help them, and honestly, it felt great, we loved being able to help people at all these events.

But we still didn’t think about it as our superpower for the world. Then at one event we attended, the host asked us to speak on stage at his next event to share our story and talk about how to build strong relationships. LIGHTBULB MOMENT! That was the moment when we realized that our relationship isn’t just our personal superpower, it’s the superpower we have to offer the world. That what we have to offer is special and can help a lot of people.

We accepted the offer to speak on stage despite it being very scary. We learned that everything we want in this life is on the other side of scary, hard or uncomfortable. That is where growth happens.

Up until now, even though we had helped others informally, we had never codified what we do and how we made our relationship so special. Preparing for that talk forced us to do that work, which became the seed for everything we’ve built to this point.

We are forever grateful for that opportunity and that we had the courage to say yes.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We specialize in transforming the important relationships in your life and doing it in a way that’s actually fun. Fun isn’t what comes to mind for most people think of when they think of working on their marriage or other relationships in their life.

We developed a framework that we call the Exponential Relationship Framework, and it will transform every relationship in your life. It has 5 pillars and here’s what it looks like for marriage:

The first pillar is having a 200% marriage mindset. Conventional wisdom tells us that a good marriage is 50-50. We want to be clear that this is a myth. A 50-50 mindset creates confusion and ambiguity, resentment, and scorekeeping. It leaves us disagreeing on things like “Whose 50% does this task fall under? Is this job mine or yours?”, “I apologized first last time, you need to apologize first this time.” , “I always initiate s*x, I’m waiting for you to do it for once.”

Successful marriages are actually 100-100, where both partners each take 100% responsibility for everything in the marriage. If something needs to be said you’re willing to be the one to say it. If something needs to be done, you’re going to do it. And if both partners are willing to adopt that mindset, you now have two people taking 100% responsibility for everything in the marriage, which means you have a 200% marriage.

And when you have a 200% marriage there is no scorekeeping, there is no defensiveness, there is no resentment for someone who isn’t showing up… and the marriage begins to feel less like a competition and more like a dream team.

The second pillar is the commitment to yourself. There is only one relationship you are guaranteed to have from the beginning of your life to the end, and it’s the most important relationship you will ever have: It’s the relationship with yourself.

Every other relationship in your life is built on the relationship you have with yourself. You are only able to give and receive love to others to the degree that you love yourself, so it is critical that you fill your own cup. Happiness is an inside job. You are responsible for your own happiness doing the things that make you happy.

There is also an epidemic of unworthiness in the world today. Most of us believe that we are not good enough or not worthy of the things we want most in this life… and those beliefs lead us to self-sabotage. When we don’t believe we are worthy of that amazing relationship, we will pick a fight or find some way to blow it up. And it’s all controlled by our subconscious… we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Reminding yourself often that you are enough, that you are worthy of everything you want, so that we can bring that highest and best version of ourselves into your marriage is critical. And when you go on that journey of self-discovery alongside your partner you learn a tremendous amount about them and your bond grows. It’s incredibly important for both partners to take that growth journey because you are either growing together or you’re growing apart.

The third pillar is the commitment to the marriage. This means prioritizing your relationship. This means doing what is necessary to strengthen your connection. This is building the skills required in your marriage to strengthen communication, intimacy, trust, and conflict resolution. It’s where many people start and stay but it’s actually just one piece of a much larger puzzle that needs to be addressed.

The critical skills required here are understanding how you each communicate and how you communicate differently so that you can learn to speak the same language. It’s understanding how you each give and receive love so that you’re both feeling loved every day. This is learning how to disagree productively so that you don’t keep fighting about the same thing over and over again and so that you can feel closer and more connected after the disagreement than you did before. This is where you learn to show up every single day to build trust. This is about allowing our partners to truly see us and to show our partner that we truly see them too.

One of the biggest issues where we see couples struggle is when it comes time to have a difficult conversation. When something is difficult or uncomfortable we tend to avoid it. It’s human nature. But we learned early on that pushing through that short-term discomfort in the spirit of long-term growth was essential. It’s like Leila Hormozi says: “If you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard – wait until you see the result of not having them.”

The fourth pillar is the commitment to fun and adventure. When something stops being fun, we pull away and don’t want to do it anymore. And when life gets busy, usually the first thing to get dropped from the to-do list is fun. And fun is critical to the success of your relationship.

Most people believe there isn’t time for fun because they don’t have the rest of their to-do list done yet. And while it’s important to create dedicated time and space to have fun together, it’s at least as important to create fun in the mundane activities of daily life, because let’s face it, life is 99% mundane. Making dinner, doing laundry, returning emails, calling the plumber, taking the kids to soccer practice, and building a business all put fun in the backseat.

We tell ourselves that once we’re less busy, then we’ll take the vacation, go on that adventure, and focus on fun. The focus has to be now, or there won’t be a later. Find time to dance in the kitchen. Have inside jokes. Turn on a song you both love and race to see who can fold the most laundry. If you’re looking for fun and adventure in your life, you’ll find it. If you’re not looking for it, you’ll never see it.

The fifth pillar is the commitment to the future. You have to know where you’re going – that’s your shared common vision for the future. Having a shared common vision is critical to building an us-vs-the-world energy that bonds you like nothing else. The shared common vision brings into focus what really matters because when you’re both busy building that dream vision you co-created together, the less important stuff just falls away.

We’re really proud of our framework – it has transformed not just our relationship and the important relationships in our lives but also the relationships for so many others. We’ve worked with couples who are freshly engaged and right up to married for more than 30 years, and everyone in between. The framework works. And the best part is, it’s fun. it doesn’t have to be painful – you can actually enjoy transforming your relationships.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
AI is definitely creating a huge shift in every industry and in every market. Technology is advancing so fast right now that it’s exponentially changing in months not years. But the one thing that we believe isn’t changing is the need for quality relationships in your life. Harvard has a study, it’s been ongoing for more than 80 years and it studies what leads people to have healthy, happy, more successful lives, and their primary finding is not money, exercise, diet or career achievement – it’s quality relationships.

While AI can definitely give you some tips and strategies to implement into your relationships, there is no substitute at this point for actual human connection. Being able to talk through an obstacle in your relationship and in your life with someone who has been through what you’re going through and who cares about you isn’t the same thing and gets very different results than asking AI how to tackle that same obstacle. Being part of a community where you see vulnerability role modelled is not the same thing as AI telling you how to be vulnerable. The opportunity to contribute to a community and help someone else who is struggling gives you such a sense of contribution and makes you feel so good, and there is no AI substitution for that.

Humans will never evolve past the need for human connection and quality relationships. It’s evolutionary. It’s primal. It’s required.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.roadoflifecoaching.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meredithandcraig/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meredithandcraig/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredithandcraig/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RoadOfLifeCoaching