Join us on this enlightening episode of WyzeCast™ as we dive into the inspiring world of entrepreneurial couples. Our special guests, Carina Reeves and Matt Hillard, are groundbreaking relationship coaches who have made it their mission to help couples succeed in business while also nurturing a loving and thriving relationship.

In this episode, Carina and Matt will share their secrets to achieving the perfect synergy between love and entrepreneurship. They’ll discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when couples embark on joint business ventures and how to leverage those experiences for personal and professional growth.

You’ll discover practical strategies and heartfelt anecdotes as they reveal the keys to maintaining a harmonious partnership while chasing ambitious business goals. Whether you’re already in business with your partner or considering it, this episode is a must-listen. Learn how to build a love-first foundation and thrive together in the world of entrepreneurship with Carina Reeves and Matt Hillard, your guides to a fulfilling, successful life as an entrepreneurial couple.

Watch on YouTube – Premieres October 26th, 7 AM ET

Listen on Spotify

Carina Reeves
From what we’ve learned, being relationship coaches, is relationships are a crucible for discovering ourselves. Really, it’s how I connect with you, with him, is me bumping up against my limitations, my hesitations, my worries. And so, if I’m fighting my relationship, I’m actually fighting myself, and I can’t be in alignment with my business if I’m spending the whole time fighting with myself.

Melanie McSally
Welcome to another episode of WyzeCast™, the show that elevates the voices, shines the light, showcases the gifts of our heart-centered guests, and amplifies the positive differences they are making in the world.

In a world where four out of ten couples are thinking about leaving their partners, today’s guests are two groundbreaking relationship coaches who specialize in guiding couples through the challenges of love and entrepreneurship. They have over ten years of experience changing the lives of couples and individuals, combining simple everyday strategies with deep, powerful, life-changing wisdom that gives you more connection, intimacy, and profit. They teach ambitious entrepreneur couples how to have a powerful, intimate partnership. This is the most direct way to thrive long-term in business. With their help, their clients have fallen back in love with their partners and with themselves as they change the world as entrepreneurs, and the world has never needed it more. Karina Reeves and Matt Hillard are passionate about helping entrepreneurial couples become a dream team with a, or maybe even multiple, six and seven-figure businesses and, AND a relationship that feels like winning the life lottery. Who doesn’t want to have it all?

My name is Melanie mcSally, your host for today’s episode, and without further adieu, I would like to welcome the lovely, inspirational couple, who I just adore, Karina Reese and Matt Hillard, coming to us from the east coast of Canada. However, Karina actually originates from BC, Canada, and Matt is from London, England.

Carina Reeves
This is fun doing this with you. Thank you so much, Melanie, for inviting us to be on. We are really excited to be changing relationships of couple-entrepreneurs, whether it’s their own business or if they both have a business. The stat of the highest divorce rate, it’s entrepreneurs who are changing the world. We are the ones building the new vision and the new thing.

Melanie McSally
I love this concept of entrepreneurial couples, but I can definitely see how living and working together might have pros and cons. I’ve heard you two talk about how putting your relationship first can actually add more time to your day. And you know how I am all about saving time, money, and energy. So, can you explain to our listeners, how does putting your relationship first add more time to your day?

Carina Reeves
I love that question. How does putting the relationship first add more time in your day? Well, I think we’ve both had experiences where when you’re fighting with your person, it’s like nothing else really good is happening or flowing. You don’t feel good in your body, your mind is disconnected, your mind is distracted, I think is an even better word. And so, think about how much time gets wasted when you are fighting with your partner. You’re not taking over the world when you’re fighting at home, or it’s from an energy of pushing away the relationship, which actually, like anger, can have a lot of galvanizing and empowering energy. But we love the idea of togetherness and being holistic and synergistic with other people. It is an energy that we think is when the masculine and the feminine are flowing together. And that cohesiveness, that synergy, is what the world really needs to combine love and business, to combine togetherness and vision. How does that feel for you?

Matt Hilliard
All of that? Yeah, especially, the amount of time that you can spend, let me backtrack, so much of the time, I see people putting their relationships on the backburner. That happens, I think, especially a lot when there’s an entrepreneur or two entrepreneurs in a couple, because of the focus required by the business and growing businesses is so it’s so sharp. There’s a belief that you can just – you’ve met your person, maybe you’re married, maybe you live together, maybe your parents – it will just take care of itself and continue to take care of itself.

Carina Reeves: Yeah.

Matt Hilliard
And it may for a while, and I think for sure phases are completely fine and necessary to grow a business and take care of other things that come up in life, but as an ongoing choice, there’s going to be increasing wear and tear on the relationship. And then the conflicts that arise that don’t get resolved and the continuing loops of conflict, just kind of eat away at the edges and then at the core of your day, and the time that you’re not working, you’re spending trying to fix the relationship. It is exhausting and time-consuming. So, prioritizing your relationship, and like you were saying, having that interweaving of a work and relationship, they can feed one another.

Carina Reeves
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. Is there anything else I wanted to add? Ah, ah, there’s something else you said. Oh, yeah, putting it on the back burner. And I love how you said how that eats away at the foundation, at the core of the two; it feels like when you fall in love with someone, it feels like you can take on the world like anything, literally anything is possible. So when you eat away at that experience, that belief, that foundation, especially as an entrepreneur, you’re eating away at your lifeforce, you’re eating away at who and how you want to be in the world, which, if you’re in a relationship is about being in that relationship. So you stop being in that relationship, you stop being in yourself, and you stop being in the world when you aren’t nourishing all the pieces.

Matt Hilliard: Yeah, beautiful.

Carina Reeves: Thank you.

Melanie McSally
I can totally relate to this. I am deeply impacted by energy. So when I’m upset, someone I care about is upset, or I’m just in negative energy, productivity goes out the door or out the window (however, you want to phrase that) because I am focused on the energy rather than what I’m actually doing. But when things are flowing, they’re flowing, right? And when you’re in flow, it can feel like time stands still and yet, you get so much accomplished. Being productive and feeling the joy and security of being in a loving and aligned relationship, to me, feels like having it all, what a blessing. Alright, so that’s all definitely a pro. But I’ve heard you say entrepreneurial couples have the highest divorce rate, which would be obviously a con. So, can you tell our listeners why that is? Why do entrepreneurial couples have the highest divorce rate?

Matt Hilliard: This is a good one.

Carina Reeves: It’s a good one.

Matt Hilliard: Do you want to lead us off?

Carina Reeves: I thought this one was yours.

Matt Hilliard: Yeah, You’re right. So, yeah, you found…

Carina Reeves: I found the stat.

Matt Hilliard
Yeah. So I didn’t know it was a stat, and I’m not surprised that it is the stat that it is because entrepreneurship does require intense focus and dedication to building that business, to achieving those goals, and that can be done to the detriment of the relationship. If you have the belief that the relationship is just going to take care of itself, because you’ve met the one and things were so good and easy at the beginning, and that that’s just going to continue without any nurturing, without any management for lack of a better word, that’s only going to work in the short term. Entrepreneurship, people come to it from a place of passion, for an idea that they want to bring into the world. It might also be to support the couple, to support the family if you have kids. And so there’s grace, there’s identity wrapped up in that, there’s mission wrapped up into that. So it can feel like the most important priority is building that business, is following through on the commitments to the business. And to be asked to take your focus away from that can feel like a compromise of identity or compromise of purpose. And, you know, we live in a society where there’s a lot of talk and excitement about being an entrepreneur and building a business and 2x-ing and 5x-ing and 10x-ing, that makes it seem really desirable. When I was growing up, entrepreneurship wasn’t a career, you were a small business owner.

Carina Reeves: Yeah, like, you owned the corner shop or something.

Matt Hilliard
Yeah, you have a corner shop and the thing you did was the business that you ran, but now entrepreneurship is actually an identity that people have and people to aspire to. So to ask people, or suggest to people that maybe a relationship is more important. I think it could be quite unnerving in a way. So yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that divorce occurs more often in entrepreneurship and entrepreneur couples.

Carina Reeves
Yeah. I love that. Thank you. And I want to add this awareness too, of the water we swim in, of our society, of the stereotypes of going out. Right, we’ve had the, the adoration, or the excitment, what’s the word to be like the example of the 50s, right, where the men go out, and they do all the business things, and the women do the house things. There’s this separation of who does what; doing things together is kind of a modern, I think it’s quite a modern concept. It requires putting down and letting go of some of the beliefs of the individual, of the lone wolf of the it’s me against the world. And you have to put down those beliefs to be in the synergy of doing things together. It’s not just my ego; it’s not just my validation. It’s how are we doing things together?

Can you feel like how separate that is? Can you feel how separate that is? Going from I have accomplished this, to we are building this. Then, it starts to weave together a much healthier way of seeing yourself, which lets you have a healthier way of being in a relationship together, which lets you have a more flowing and healthy and organic way of how you show up in the world. If it is all push and shove and force and demand and yeah, that 10x energy you were talking about?

I don’t want to get to the 10x and then look down and be like, is that all there is? Yeah, right, which I’ve heard about a lot from other entrepreneurs and other coaches. It’s like, okay, I’ve got the goal. And it feels empty. Yeah. And the opposite of feeling empty is when we feel connected. Yeah. That is the opposite of feeling empty. So people who are entrepreneurs; there are probably a lot of us that are coming from, what can I accomplish? What can I be? What is the thing I can create in the world?

You want to shift from wanting to prove yourself to wanting to explore what’s possible. Instead of proving yourself, you’re exploring what’s possible, and then you’re not the lone wolf conquering the world; you are a connected human being starting first with your relationship and then spreading that discovery and amplification into the world.

I’ve heard people talk about money, that there’s a fear of when I make more money, who will I be? What if I turned into a rich asshole? I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear. But anyway. Money amplifies who you already are. What we’re offering is, we want entrepreneurial success to be more of who you are. And so you want that to start with being connected human beings, not disconnected, running for some arbitrary finish line. Does that resonate?

Matt Hilliard 16:15
Yeah, there’s one thing you said about proving yourself. So what does that look like? If I prove myself when I’ve met this goal, or when I’ve met this goal, or when I’ve worked 16-hour days, or a whole month in a row. Those are very individual goals. There’s always another goal, there’s always another summit. So that can be a treadmill to know if you’re working at proving yourself, and then when you’ve proved yourself, you’ll turn your attention to the relationship because you can rest a bit. You may never get to turn your attention to the relationship, or the relationship might already be gone by that point.

Carina Reeves 17:04
Yes, because the healthy, I’m just going to talk about feminine energy for a second, feminine energy loves more. Like ooh, I love this chocolate. Oh, I also love this house, this outfit, this relationship, this… It is actually, it can be a healthy energy of what else would I like, but not if it comes from proving; proving is more of a toxic energy. So when you are already connected and enjoying each other, then you reach a goal and you’re like, Oh, that was fun. That was amazing. I’d love that. What would you like to do now? What would feel good next, is very different than the proving energy. It’s not a treadmill. It’s an expansion.

That’s it, I want to I want the world to shift from a treadmill to enjoying expansion. I think that’s the healthy feminine and the healthy energies working together.

Melanie McSally
Oh my God, being in a state of expansion instead of running on a treadmill! That creates such a vivid set of images in my mind. I’m picturing an overworked, overwhelmed set of characters in a hamster wheel. Versus is the tranquillity of what we talked about earlier, being in flow. I’m picturing the serenity of a waterfall, flowing together. I love how you take this abstract concept of female and masculine energies and create these very tangible and vivid images that we can latch onto, showing us how weaving business, and relationships together in a tapestry can actually look.

You two are so adorable and so delightful. I could talk to you all day. So, what’s one last thing you’d like our entrepreneurial couples to know?

Carina Reeves
How to be present with yourself and you get to be present with your partner. And then you get to know how to be present with your clients. Present, even when silly things like when tech issues come up, or last minute changes, or a client’s not happy, or something didn’t go how you wanted. When you’re learning how to be present with yourself then everything flows from you, it unfolds as opposed to fighting and pushing with everything.

Carina Reeves
You share the bit about, some of the nuts and bolts of how, some of the beautiful ways that we help couples connect with themselves, like listening.

Matt Hilliard
So much of it is about listening; listening and reflecting and validating. When conflict happens, and gets perpetuated, so often it’s when we don’t feel heard, and feel validated, or we don’t feel understood. So learning those key skills, which most of us, especially men, didn’t learn, or didn’t learn to any great degree. To bring those into relationships is so powerful. When we get nervous, when we feel heard, our nervous system calms down. When our nervous system calms down, we listen more. So you create this kind of this flow, of listening and understanding. And that’s really key to a successful relationship. In a business, relationships are everywhere, they’re with our employees, they’re with our clients, with our service providers. So these skills that allow us to be present in our primary relationships also support our businesses in really, really fundamental ways. So if there’s, if there’s one thing I want every couple to know, it’s, it’s the importance of listening, the importance of reflecting, the importance of validating, and doing it in a way that your partner feels heard, feels listened to, feels feels validated.

Carina Reeves 22:33
How you do anything is how you do everything. There’s energy that’s the same, that’s same same. So, you know, there’ll be voices that come up that will say, this is a waste of time to turn towards your partner when there’s a conflict. We have to get this other thing done. There’s a bit of that, of walking on the edge; sometimes there are things that just need to get done. But to keep putting off the relationship means that you’re not turning towards yourself; your relationship is part of the foundation of who you are and I want every couple to let that in, to let in the person that they love; let them in to see the parts that are hurt, not as an attack, but as a place to learn and to grow, and then together, you get to bring that into your business.

Melanie McSally
Wow, listening, reflecting, and validating. You know, I bet if we went out and interviewed thousands of successful couples that have stayed married for decades, an overwhelming percentage of them would say that the key to their success is communication. And while I believe wholeheartedly that that’s true. I love what you’ve given our listeners here today because you’ve taken this broad concept of communication and you’ve broken it down into tangible ways to make sure that I’ve understood my partner, and are validating them, even if I don’t agree with them. I know for myself it can feel quite frustrating when I don’t feel heard. And it can feel equally lonely when I don’t feel understood. So I love that you’re giving these very tangible, concrete, something that we can latch onto, advice to work through those barriers, those trouble points, or even just to avoid them.

It has been such a pleasure having you two with us today. If I’m not mistaken. I think you have an offer or a gift for our listeners. Do you want to tell us about that?

Carina Reeves
Yes, haha, it has a bit of a funny title: 10 Tips to Work with Your Spouse Without Killing Them. Because it can feel like it’s sometimes. And when you have some tools and references in your pocket for how you can talk to yourself, in your own mind, people call it mindset; people call it your little voice. When you get to know yourself better and have more tools, you get to be kinder to yourself and kinder to your partner, and then you have more time to change the world and make more money.

Matt Hilliard
Yeah, and then the 10 Tips to Work with Your Spouse Without Killing Them cover places where you might not realize conflict and blocks are occurring in the relationship. So hopefully, it will shed some light across your relational landscape, your entrepreneurial landscape, to places to pay attention, and perhaps be aware of what you’re doing, and offer suggestions of how to do things differently to create more harmony, and ease, and connection, and intimacy.

Carina Reeves
Society likes to pretend everything is separate and I promise you, everything is connected. So how you speak to your partner if you want them to bring you coffee, or how you relate to each other when the washing up is still in the sink. I promise that all adds in, and our wish is that it seems like an opportunity, as opposed to overwhelm, because it can be overwhelming to have change. The payoff is 1,000,000% perfect and wonderful and we’re very excited to be building our new business together.

Matt Hilliard: Very wonderful.

Carina Reeves: Thank you so much, Melanie, for this opportunity to talk to you and share our perspectives.

Matt Hilliard: Yeah, thank you, Melanie, this has been wonderful.

Melanie McSally 27:00
It has been my absolute pleasure. Well, folks, there you have it. If you would like to work with your partner, in flow, to build a six or seven-plus-figure business while simultaneously having a loving relationship, then I highly suggest you take Carina and Matt up on their free gift for you to get started today. Click here to get their 10 Tips to Work with Your Spouse Without Killing Them.

Thank you to my guests Carina and Matt. It has been such a delight having you here today, listening to your wisdom and experiencing your love and joy for and with each other.

I want to thank our listeners for tuning in. If you like what you’ve heard here today, please do like, share, and comment. We are trying to get WyzeTribe™ to be a hot new release. So if you feel inspired, if you feel moved, if you feel called, if we earned it, please do like, share, and comment. It is free for you to do so and really helps the podcast grow. And we really do love your engagement.

This was another episode of WyzeCast™, the show that elevates the voices, shines the light, showcases the gifts of our heart-centered guests, and amplifies the positive difference they’re making in the world.

If you want to learn more about WyzeCast™, you can visit our wyzecast.com. We dropped ten episodes every month on the 21st, so you can binge-watch or spread them out over the month. Whatever suits your mood and lifestyle.

Once again, my name is Melanie. It has been my pleasure being your host today. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching, thank you for your engagement, and I invite you to come back and join me once again for our next episode of WyzeCast™.