[Naomi's note: Read this one -- it's killer. Our first guest post is from Kyeli. If she has a last name, I don't know it. What I do know is that she and the ever-awesome Pace have changed the way I do marriage and business and they are two of my favorite people in the world.]

Three days before my 30th birthday, I was in a major car accident. My right wrist and shoulder were severely injured. At the time, I was co-owner of a shiny new temp agency – with all the hats and stresses that come from being an entrepreneur with a baby business. Needless to say, a debilitating injury wasn’t going to be good for business.

Bear with me, this is relevant – I promise.

After a few months, with surgery scheduled and the very real possibility of never fully recovering looming dark on my horizon, my wife Pace decided to drop to half-time at her day job to become co-co-owner and take on half of my hats and responsibilities so I could focus more on recovering and less on “oh gods my business is dying and I’ve got a million things to do right now and we’re going to tank and my business partner will hate me for eternity and then some, why the holy hell was I going to Starbucks that morning?!”.

Thus, we became business partners in addition to life partners.

Everything changed.

It sounds melodramatic, but it’s really true. No longer were we focusing entirely on making our relationship better, we were now spending a great deal of focus on making the business better. Now, in a relationship, we’re a perfect team. We get along amazingly well. We’ve been together long enough to know what triggers arguments and defensiveness, and we know how to work through those issues when they occur.

But we’d never worked together before.

Our favorite analogy is the jeep driver and the train conductor: a train runs on tracks, has a schedule, and is a timely, reliable, orderly creature. A jeep goes everywhere, all-terrain, gets muddy and messy, and is often chaotic. A train conductor, given a jeep, would freak out. A jeep driver, handed a time schedule and pointed toward tracks, would flip out. A train conductor and a jeep driver would likely not, in this scenario, get along well at a party. Or as, say, co-workers.

I’m the jeep driver. She’s the train conductor.

Hilarity, and months of arguing and bickering and generally not getting along well, ensued.

I was the actual co-owner of the business, and Pace was my assistant. All too often, she’d be looking over my shoulder, bugging me to make calls, and generally bossing me around. All too often, I’d bristle to the point of complete slacking, unable to do even my menial tasks because I absolutely hate being bossed around. I didn’t become my own boss just to have my wife take over.

Eventually, we realized what was going on. Yes, even as relationship coaches, we don’t always have a clue in our own relationship. It took us a long time of struggling, arguing, hurt feelings, tears, and frustrations to realize what the underlying issues were. A lot of resentment (on both sides) had built up and needed addressing.

Then we sold the business and started our own business.

For completely unrelated (and largely irrelevant) reasons, we sold the temp agency to my business partner and devoted ourselves entirely to what had until then been a hobby, being alternative relationship coaches. We thought that owning our own business where we were equal partners would be easier. We thought it would magically solve all the problems we’d been having. We were completely wrong.

After a while, the very same issues reared their ugly heads again. We started having the same problems as before. We started having eerily similar arguments. Jeep driver vs train conductor – fight! Mud was being slung and tears were being cried. Again. Sheesh.

This time, we addressed things instead of selling our business.

We sat down and talked. I talked about my style of working, how it works, how it works for me. Pace talked about her style of working, her style of managing (she’s been a manager before), how it works in general, and how it works for her. We came up with the jeep driver vs. train conductor analogy – and that really helped us understand each other better.

I listened, really listened without my own internal dialogue chattering away, when she was talking – and she did the same for me. Being able to talk without interruption gave us each a chance to dig down and see what was underneath all the surface issues – what was really going on?

The two big things going on were: logistics and trust.

Logistically, we were now spending a huge amount of time together. 20 hours a day, every day. Eating together, sleeping together, working together, everything. We get along awesomely, but that was a bit much – we were running into walls because neither of us felt free to do our own thing for even a little while. We felt trapped, tied together, making every decision for business, house, and selves together. It was stressful. And in retrospect, stupid, but hey. Hindsight and all that.

Trust-ically, Train Conductor Pace didn’t trust Jeep Driver Me to get my work done. Pace can’t multitask well and so, naturally, makes the usual error and assumes I can’t, either. But I multitask like a crazy woman and don’t drop tasks and do get things done. Because she didn’t understand how I work – and because I work so differently from how she works – Pace thought I wasn’t working well at all.

How did we make things better?

We talked it out. We constantly reminded each other that we’re on the same team; we both want our business to succeed, we both want to be happy, we both want the same general goals and to go the same general directions.

We divvied up responsibilities. We talked about what we each love to do and what we hate to do, and each took on as much of what we love and the other hates as feasible. For example, I love to write and Pace loves to learn, so I took on leadership of our blog, and she took on leadership of various courses and classes and the like. This doesn’t mean I never learn and she never blogs, but it stopped each of us feeling like we alone had all the responsibilities.

We made a map! We worked out what our goals are, where we want to take our business, what we want to do with our business and our lives, and made maps to help us both stay on track (so to speak).

We made time for ourselves – and a set time, every week, for a date with each other – to nourish ourselves and our relationship. We make sure we each get some down time to do whatever we want, regardless, and we make sure our other needs are getting met.

Now, Pace can use Google Maps and I can go geocaching, but we each know the other will get where we both want to go.

Being a small business owner is challenging. Being a small business owner is rewarding. Being life partners can be challenging – and is also often rewarding. And the combination of the two can destroy lives – or enrich them beyond your wildest dreams. Remember to stay on the same team. Agree on your destination, make a map of how to get there, then trust your partner to get there in their own way. Listen. Communicate. Delegate (and then let go). Respect each others’ differences as strengths. And don’t forget to make time for yourselves – and a regular date night.

Kyeli Smith is half of Pace and Kyeli, a dynamic duo of alternative
relationship coaches.  She’s a freaky geeky tattooed pierced hippie
girl, raw foodist, unschooling mom, world-changer, writer, wearer of
long stripy socks and singer of silly made-up songs.  Catch her
blogging at PaceAndKyeli.com.