Okay, the title is going to make sense in a bit (mom, maybe don’t read further).
You might know us best as acro teachers or organisers of events, but in the last email you got to know us a bit as a couple.
We enjoy exploring together, going to the spa, playing games, hanging out with friends, having nice dinners and we looove cocooning at home massaging each other, chatting until late at night, watching series or movies and… well yeah the title says enough.
We'll not go into exact details in this email heheh!
Pretty impressive that we’re able to combine all this with a professional life right?
Yeah, it costs us quite some discipline sometimes to choose to work and be productive!
Okay in all seriousness, we can totally imagine people’s questions about how it is to combine all this together.
We actually got asked this exact question on our 50hr training recently, and it's a very valid question.
Because we had those thoughts and concerns too at the start.
"Isn’t it too much to share work and pleasure with the same person?"
"What if you break up?"
I think this is definitely not for everybody, but for us it works super well and we wouldn’t want it any other way!
In this blog, we’ll share why and how we make it work.
First of all; we recognize that all aspects have a different flavor.
Working and training together really isn’t quality time or a date. That’s work for us.
This means it feels different and our communication and mindset is different.
This leads to the second point, which is balancing out our time during the week.
A topic that we’ve worked on over the years to make sure there is time and space for everything and also to do things separately.
During the week I work for a couple of mornings at one of my favorite cafes so Cas has the house for himself, I go out to see friends and Cas plays boardgames a couple evenings a week for example.
Plus even when we’re at home together we often just go our own ways; Cas gaming on his laptop and I on my yoga mat outside or calling friends.
This took us some time to find balance in and that paid off feeling in a good place now.
We schedule and prioritize our training sessions and we plan moments that we work together on AcroSpirit stuff.
Which is often very efficient to get aligned and discuss things for the projects we’re working on.
I say ‘often’, because we also sometimes get distracted when working together and end up in bed!
After which we often look at each other, laugh and say ‘I love co-working with you!’.
So I think the two main takeaways we have are:
Divide and schedule your time mindfully.
As long as we do this and make sure that there is a balance between work, training, quality time and alone time we feel perfectly happy to combine this together.
We wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else.
I remember when having conversations about this topic when we were dating that Cas shared about having concerns about it maybe being too much, but at the same time really wanting to do everything together.
We discussed how we did not want to choose, because training together was too fun, working together felt so aligned, teaching together was so easy and having a relationship together felt so right.
This lead us to how we feel strongly right now: we wouldn’t want it any other way.
We don’t feel a strong desire to train or teach with anyone else (there are still potential benefits to working with others, but it doesn't feel particularly desirable for us now), because we feel like we’re only at the start of building our partnership and it just feels too good and aligned!
Take our Europe trip as an example; how awesome that we get to do that together!
When our relationship evolved and got more serious it took the concerns of the second question away: ‘What if we break up?’.
This concern naturally went away as our relationship deepened.
We’re planning our future together, we would like to have kids (yeah our moms are getting excited when reading this) and want to grow our training and teaching and AcroSpirit together.
When we realized how good everything is and how well it all can work together it felt so right to pursue everything further, and the concerns of what could go wrong just diminished.
Plus we have such a deep respect and trust in one another that if something like a break up would happen in the relationship we would navigate that in the best way possible.
What helps us in all of this and more is our communication and ability to switch.
We’re always learning and growing in our communication and finding ways to work even better together in every aspect of our relationship.
And we switch into different mindsets.
When we work, we work.
When we train, we train.
And when we have quality time, we have quality time.
Which brings me to the last point and you may consider this a training tip...
We made a new rule that is ‘no sex before training’.
We found that this impacts the quality of our training since we find ourselves not at all in a training mindset and our bodies feel not ready hehe!
Okay folks! That was enough details on our personal life!
At least we hope that this email gave you some insights into how we combine everything together!
I just want to add two last important things.
Which is that we’re totally aware that people work in different ways, all based on personal preferences.
Our approach and mixing a work and romantic relationship may not work for other people.
Either way all approaches come with their own challenges and struggles.
So our way is also not always easy.
We have deep conversations to find alignment, we have periods that feel imbalanced and we sometimes struggle to find solutions.
So it’s not always perfect, but when it's good, it's magic.
We’re willing to put in the work and effort because we love this more than the challenges and we’re seeing how we can navigate through it and make it better.
Cheers to that!
Ciao!
Laura
