S06|12 - Creating a Family Brand (and strengthening difficult marriages) with Melissa Smith

Thank you, Crystal. I'm excited. By way of an introduction, I'm Melissa. I'm married to Chris, we have five kids ages six to 15, and we have a podcast called Family Brand. We have a program called Family Brand also, and we will get into this in a little bit about what Family Brand actually is. But it's a program essentially for families on how to build stronger families, create more attention and adventure, and just a life that you really love as a family.

Yeah, and I do. We've decided that we will share openly our struggles and our story because I feel like oftentimes this conversation about having... I think it's getting better, but I feel like sometimes this is like a taboo subject to say, 'I'm struggling in my marriage,' and to not even know where to turn or feel like you're the only one that's ever gone through that or is going through that now. So we make it a really strong point that we will talk about our journey, the highs and the lows.

Totally. And I feel like to your point, when it... our story, I guess, is we were married really young. I think I was 20 and my husband was 22. And then after the birth, you know, I think four years or so passed and we were happy enough, I guess you would say, but definitely we didn't date very long. And just after the birth of our second son, right after the birth, like that six-week postpartum moment, my husband came home and was like, 'I'm not happy. I don't want to be married anymore.' And I was like, I knew that we weren't connecting well at that moment, but I just had chocked it up to, 'Well, we just had a baby and there's so much going on.' But I didn't see that coming in that way, as far as 'I'm ready to be done.' And I was totally devastated by it. But I think a lot of times in marriage, what I've found since then is that it won't... as long as... so he was ready to give up on the marriage, but I for whatever reason at that moment felt like, 'No, it's not time.' And so when it came to finding a counselor and things, he was going to go along with it just so he could say, 'Check that box.' Basically, 'Okay, we saw a counselor, check the box.'

Yes. And so I think that... I don't... whenever I talk about this, I feel like I have to give this big... not... I don't feel like every marriage should be saved or every marriage should stay together. But for ours, I felt very strongly that ours was a marriage that I wasn't ready to give up on yet. So we did, we saw a counselor one time. And I didn't like that counselor, and neither did Chris. And so I went back online and I started researching more counselors. And then another counselor stuck out to me that I was like, 'No, I think we need to try one more counselor.' And I've since learned that when going to find a counselor, especially in a marriage, it is important to build that rapport. And sometimes you get there and you don't build that relationship right away. So it's okay to shop around a little bit until you find... in fact, I think you should do that. So you're not just with a therapist for a year or more and not getting any results or any change happening because there really isn't that connection or it's not effective for you.

Yes. So the second counselor that we saw, the first session that we had with them, we came together... well, we drove separately, but we came to the appointment together. We were separated at the time. We decided to separate, and he was living with some of our friends and I was staying home with our two toddlers. And we just connected with this gentleman in a way that we hadn't with the other one. And I felt like he saw us as a couple. He asked us our story, and we told him our story, and you know how we had met and everything. And he just told us like, 'I think you have something worth fighting for.' And no one had been willing to tell us that before. Everyone was willing to be like, 'Well, whatever you think, and we'll support you.' But I think so desperately we needed someone to be like, 'You have something worth fighting for.' And he saw Chris individually. Chris was struggling... I always get emotional about this. Chris was struggling, I was struggling of course. But he saw each of us and was able to pour into us individually and as a couple. And we didn't even see him that long, but that really changed things for us. And of course it was a longer from there, like rebuilding. But that was like a huge changing point for us.

Yes, totally. And so it can kind of get in the way of your own inner story. But I love that you knew that you weren't ready to give up on it and that you worked and tried to find something that worked, and that you kind of followed your own intuition to find that person.

Yeah, I think for... if I... when people ask me this, they're like, 'So what did you do?' And I'm like, 'How do I adequately describe this in a very short amount of time?' Because it wasn't... I wouldn't say it was any one thing. But if I could say like one big idea from there, I think we realized that I needed... or I got to work on me, and Chris got to work on Chris, becoming the person that we wanted to be individually, the best versions of ourselves. And I think that as we worked on that, that is what made the biggest difference. Because it wasn't about... I think a lot of our marriage had been like, 'Well, if you wouldn't do this, then I wouldn't do this.' And 'if it wasn't this way, then it wouldn't be that way.' But it's like taking 100% responsibility each of us individually for the marriage as it was and for the creation of how we wanted it to be and how we wanted our lives to look after that. So I occasionally coach couples, either on parenting or on their relationship, and that is literally what I start off with. I'm like, 'It is not your together work that needs healing. It's our own inner self-work.' Because as we work on a relationship with ourselves, then we're coming to that relationship from a healed, more emotionally responsible, emotionally mature space. And I find that when there's... because there's a lot of prescriptive marriage advice out there, like even reflective listening, like 'Say, I feel this when you do this,' and 'Make sure you're looking at them in the eyes,' and 'You take time for date nights.' And they're giving you really specific things to do. And then some people are like, 'Well, this isn't really working,' or 'It feels inauthentic.' I think it's so much more effective than doing that advice to take time to do whatever your own inner healing is. Not even finding a marriage therapist, you can just find somebody for you too, and they can find somebody for them, or whatever healing modality feels right for each of you. But I do think it is that self-healing that then you can come together as these whole people, and you just naturally communicate effectively. You don't have to worry about how do I do reflective listening and how do I make sure that they're feeling validated. I think it just happens more naturally. Healthy communication just kind of comes naturally from that space.

How long did it... do you feel like it took you? You're going through this process of working on you and him working on him and together... So before we started recording, I mentioned that at this time I came across this statistic that said that they were interviewing couples that rated their marriage or their relationship as unhappy... I think it was actually labeled as 'extremely unhappy.' And when they interviewed these couples, the sample five years later, couples that had chose to stay together to continue to work on their marriage, 87% of them rated their marriage as extremely happy five years later. And I remember when I first read that statistic, you know this is like during our darkest moments of separation, feeling like really hopeful that 87% of these couples were happy five years later after they had started this experiment, I guess you would say. But also realizing five years was a really long time. When you're in the middle of it, five years seems like forever. We hadn't even been married five years at that point. So to think more than doubling the length of our marriage up to that point... yeah, I was like, 'That is a really long time.' But that totally gave me hope to be like, 'Okay, we can find happiness. I know we can. And it's not just like this outlier. We can do it. But no one actually does it. 87% of these couples found happiness, created happiness in their marriage.' And so I would say... I had that... my newborn... and then it wasn't this linear, every day is getting better. You know, it was up and down and up and down. But I would say... I think that is always how it goes, by the way. Just say that we wanted to be like linear progression where we can look back and be like, 'Last week was worse and this week is better.' And it's better. I just don't think it works like that.

So that can feel so discouraging. But it was... we had another baby about three years later. But prior to having her, we decided like, 'Okay, are we in this? Are we in this marriage? Are we doing this? Are we sticking together no matter what?' And so that had us... the thought of having a new baby... I think really it was before we decided to have a new baby, we were having these conversations and we decided, 'Yeah, we're going to do it. We're going to create the life together.' And yeah, so like I said, we had a baby about three years later. But I would say probably two and a half years or so of consistent effort and attention. And even since then, it's like we know the risks. I just feel like now I approach my marriage in such a different way than I would have if we had never been through any of that before. So I feel like even from that point, it's like we're still having our date nights, we're still making time to connect with each other in a meaningful way, realizing what it really takes to keep a marriage alive. I feel like it is a living, breathing thing that you have to invest attention and love and time into creating. And I feel like I still take my marriage, my husband for granted, but not anything like I think I would have had we not gone through this together.

Yeah, we can shift from here. But I think too that... oh shoot, I forgot what I was going to say.

Yeah, so from there... I'm trying to think timeline-wise. Okay, so Chris has a consulting company. He helps companies that hire him or individuals that hire him. He helps them get really clear on what it is they stand for as a business and what they want to be known for as a business, kind of like these foundational identity pieces that sometimes they either forget or don't really dial into to begin with. So it kind of helps them visit their origins and their roots, and from there they can often experience really great growth once they connect back to that. So one day he came from work and he was like, 'We should take our family through my process.' And as an entrepreneur wife, Chris was always coming up with things like, 'We should do this, we should do that.' And I was like, 'Okay, yeah, let's take our family through your process.' So we went to his office one day, the whole family. This was probably like 2016. And we sat in his office and we went through his process. And at the end I was like, 'That was actually really profound. That was actually really cool.' And we kind of just branded our family in a way. We got really clear on who we were as a family, what we wanted to be known for. And also part of the catalyst for this was... in our extended families, like Chris for example has two brothers that have passed away due to addiction-related deaths. It was part of it for us also was... we need to develop a strong family narrative for our kids to follow. It didn't need to be this path that Smiths necessarily deal with addiction and the things that kind of come along with that. We need a new narrative for our kids. And so I think that was a huge catalyst too in defining and creating this Family Brand for ourselves, to create this for our children. How do we make sure that we are as strong as possible, that they are as strong and connected to us as possible? So then from there, we kind of took our family through it, and then Chris, again the entrepreneur that he is, loves talking about it. So he's talking about it to everyone, like, 'Hey, we just took our family through this thing.' We eventually called it Family Brand. And then people that he knew were like, 'Well, can you come talk to our community about this? This sounds really cool.' And then I think I was a little apprehensive about really wanting to make it something more than just this cool thing that we did. But I had this really cool experience too where I felt really strongly from God, like, 'Hey, this wasn't just for you. This is for other families too. And this is what your next thing is.' So we feel really called to do it. And especially we really launched it during quarantine in 2020, when we really launched it. And I just could see in real time families were struggling with their children and with their marriage. And it was like, 'Wow, families, there aren't a lot of resources for families other than the ones we talked about, like a counselor or a therapist.' I was like, 'Can we provide families with another resource on how to create a strong family, how to grow together, how to create a life that you love?' And that's really what our program is: creating a life that you love, creating intentionally, growing together, creating relationships that last, and defining your family values and who you want to be.

So our program has evolved from the beginning. And as it sits now, I really love what we've done. Because at first we just had families like, 'Okay, establish values, go do it.' And we had Chris taking a family through our process at the time, and a family came back to them and they were like, 'We have 18 family values. We are fighting because we can't decide which ones are more important.' So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and thought, 'Okay, how can we make this a little bit more formulaic for people or for families, so it can still be uniquely yours as a family?' It's formula, not meaning that everyone is going to have the exact same, but is there something foundationally that we could explore that would make this easier for families? And we actually came across this really cool research out of the University of Nebraska that was done with like 24,000 family members over the course of a couple of decades in 34 countries. And the whole premise of the research was, 'What makes up strong families?' And they said that the reason they did this research was because most research that had been done up to that point around families was, 'Why are families deteriorating? Why are families falling apart?' But they wanted to flip it and look at, 'What makes a strong family?' So they took all this research and they solidified it down into core strengths, core values that they believe strong families possess. So our program walks families through what these core values are, and then we have each family go a little bit deeper depending on your family, your unique situation, in these core values, if that makes sense. So I'll just say briefly, and we've kind of branded some of this ourselves. So these are some of... taking their research and making them to our words. It's like: we prioritize. Strong families prioritize family, prioritize time together. They appreciate each other, they speak words of appreciation and words of affirmation to each other. They talk, they talk often about little things and big things, but they're in this dialogue with each other ongoing. They bond, they spend time together. They believe... I thought this one was interesting to me. This doesn't have to be synonymous with religion, but there's a foundational spiritual element to strong families. Whether that is a belief your family has that we're all connected, or maybe it's a shared religion that you have, but it doesn't have to be. And then we overcome. Strong families can tackle hard things and they can tackle it together, and they can overcome. And then the last one is we impact. Strong families know that they can make a difference in the world, and that they can decide together how they want to show up in the world and how they want to impact and make that difference.

Yeah, absolutely. We've had just a couple months ago, we had a couple going through our program that he's Christian, she's atheist, and they were able to create a beautiful Family Brand with these differing beliefs. Which actually we have found a lot of families have enjoyed our program if they do have differing religious beliefs, because it's a way for them to come together in a way that sometimes feels a little tumultuous, I guess at times.

Okay, I think that's all my questions. I think I asked everything. But before we go, can you share how people can work with you and especially how they can share in your program and stuff?

Oh, I love that. Mine is also a quiz. It's 'Find Your Parenting Personality' quiz. And it does a similar thing. It gives you one of four personality types and then tells you the weaknesses and strengths there and what you can work on.