The Husband and Wife Dynamic: Tracey Walker Coaches a Couple Building Together

You want your spouse fully in the business with you. Not cheering from the sidelines, actually building it alongside you. Then you sit down to actually do that, and within a week you’re arguing about who should be doing what, how close is close enough, and why the same question about the computer keeps needing to be asked again. If that’s familiar, you’re not bad at marriage or bad at business. You’ve just never had anyone sit both of you down and name what’s actually happening.

Tracey Walker does exactly that in this Unstoppable Mastermind session, coaching a married couple, Cheryl and Steve, through a live version of the exact friction a lot of couples building a business together hit. As someone trying to build something with a spouse, a partner, or even a sibling, you’ll recognize both sides of this conversation.

What Does Working as a Team Actually Mean When You Disagree About It?

Cheryl wants full togetherness: the videos, the strategy, the daily work, done side by side. Steve pictures something closer to a division of labor, each partner running their own lane and reconvening once the work is done. Neither is wrong. They’re just picturing two completely different structures under the same word, “team,” and neither one had said that plainly until Tracey made them say it out loud in front of each other.

The immediate friction point was technical help. Steve knows the computer side. Cheryl doesn’t, and every time he shows her a step, she needs it again a few days later, which understandably wears on him. Tracey’s fix wasn’t more patience from Steve. It was a practical shift: record him walking through the steps once, with his permission, so Cheryl can replay it instead of asking him to repeat himself in person every time. Small mechanic, real relief on both sides, because now the knowledge lives somewhere other than his patience running out.

Is the Real Problem a Skills Gap, or Something Else Entirely?

Here’s where the session turns. Cheryl kept describing a list of things she felt she needed to learn before she could go sell anything. Tracey pushed back hard and directly.

My opinion is that you are self-sabotaging. You are creating things in your mind that you need to master and learn and do because you’ve told yourself that you cannot make these sales and you cannot help anybody until you know how to do these things first.

That’s the internal conflict driving the whole disagreement, and it had nothing to do with Steve. Cheryl already had a blog, an autoresponder, and a lead capture page, the three pieces anyone needs to run this kind of business online. As Tracey Walker puts it, “there’s nothing stopping you from doing anything. The three components that you need, you have.” The technical excuse was covering for a simpler fear: taking the actual step of putting herself in front of people and asking for the sale.

This is worth sitting with if you’ve ever told yourself you need one more course, one more certification, one more conversation with your spouse about the setup before you’re ready. Sometimes that’s true. Often it’s a very comfortable way to avoid the part that actually feels risky, which is showing up and asking someone to say yes.

Why Does the Newer Partner Resist the Experience the Veteran Partner Already Has?

The deeper layer here is a newbie-versus-veteran dynamic. Before this business, Steve and Cheryl had already built a business worth real money together. Steve brought instinct from that experience, wanting to move fast and adjust as he went. Cheryl wanted to follow the structured steps of the program precisely, in order, without skipping ahead, because structure is what a newer person reasonably reaches for.

Tracey uses a basketball analogy to make the tension make sense: a coach teaches beginners the fundamentals by the book, step by step, because they need the foundation. But a player with real game experience doesn’t need the same instructions repeated, because instinct has already replaced the checklist. Neither approach is wrong. The friction shows up when one partner insists on the book while the other has already lived past needing it, and nobody’s named which one applies to which parts of the business.

Her advice wasn’t to pick a side. It was to let the experienced partner’s instinct in, even where it doesn’t match the packaged steps exactly, while still respecting why structure matters to the partner still building confidence in the fundamentals. As she tells Cheryl directly, “But to get something you’ve never had, you gotta do something you’ve never done.” That line doubles as the whole session’s thesis. Whatever the two of you have been doing that isn’t producing results, doing it more carefully isn’t the fix. Doing something different is.

• Define what “working as a team” means to each of you specifically, rather than assuming you’re picturing the same thing.
• Record instructions once instead of repeating them, so the knowledge doesn’t depend on one partner’s patience.
• Ask honestly whether a stated skills gap is really about missing information, or about avoiding the moment you have to act.

The full session goes much further into how Tracey works through the couple’s specific business goals and what changed once Cheryl stopped waiting to feel ready. Create your free account and you can watch the whole session, plus download the audio, at empowernetwork.com/watch.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Husband versus wife. Okay, so tell me the dynamic. What's going on? What do you want to do and what is not happening that you want to happen?

Well, I want us to work together, building the business together, just doing everything, the videos, you know, things like that, just as a team versus me just building the business by myself. And, you know, my husband just coming along sometimes, meeting some things like that. I just want, you know, when we're at home, that we're a team. Let me ask you this.

Steve, what is it that you want? You know, I want us to work together as a team, but I have a different concept of what that means and what she has. And, you know, for Cheryl, for us to work together as a team, it's like everything we do, we do like this, like, you know. We're in one.

Siamese twins. Siamese twins, where to me, working as a team is, you do this, this is your skills, this is your strengths. I work on this, this is my skills, this is my strength. We get more accomplished together, you know, working on what we need to work.

So y'all can go away, work on what you're supposed to work on, and when you come together, you did your part, you did your part, and mission accomplished. Okay, so, okay, yes, ma'am. Okay, one more thing. Dealing with that, he's, you know, on the computer, he's great.

He knows how to get on the computer. He knows how to get on there and just do things like this here. Me, it takes several, you know, several, several times. And if I get distracted by something, it's almost like starting all over.

Okay. And so that's what I mean by, you know, us, you know, working together. So do you need him? Yeah.

To help you? Yeah, with the computer stuff. I mean, the technical stuff. And what are you saying?

You're saying no, she doesn't. Oh, she does need the help, but it's, she just, once you try to help, it just, I already know that. I already know that. Aha.

So she's asking. She's asking for help, but when you say it, she knows everything. She's omnipotent, omniscient. She's all the omnis.

To keep peace, I just had to go off in a moment. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

So you don't, so you, you do welcome the idea of doing the business. Yes, absolutely. And you entertain the idea of working together with her in the business. Don't assign me twins, but yes.

Okay, so the way in which you work together is what has to be cleared up. But the fact that you will work together, that's okay. That's okay. Okay.

Um, so do you feel that the Siamese twin action is really what you need to thrive? No, I think it was me. Okay. Doing that because I didn't understand how to do stuff on the computer.

Okay. I wanted to sit there and say, okay, now how do you, how do you. You want him to take you step by step, hand, hand, handhold you to get through certain things. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, because I didn't know how to do it and he already knew how to do it. And just to make things move faster. I wanted him to show me.

I wanted him to show me how to do it also. So when he's not doing a certain thing, I could go over here and do it without him. You know, now let me ask you this, this is just out of curiosity. So let's say that you want to him to show you how to do something and you go to show her how to do this.

Something does she then come back and then ask you to do that something again at a later point in time about five minutes later. Okay. So when he shares with you how to do this, something, what are you doing to make sure that you are maximizing and utilizing his time effectively, so that you don't have to keep asking. I'm asking him again, when he just like, do you, in other words, he, you say, okay, how do I cut on the computer just for example, right?

He says, okay, you look around the back, see this little button, you press this button, you hold it for three seconds, you let it go, you come back around and you sit down. If that were the instructions, do you write that down? No, I, do you record him when he's telling you, like, if he's explaining something, you record it. So if you don't want to write it, you at least like capturing what he's saying so that you can replay it if you need to, if you missed a step.

Uh, no. Okay. So it sounds like just in this one little area that Steve is willing to help, uh, willing to be a partner, right? As he said, the issue is that he can't keep coming back and forth with the same thing over and over and over and over again.

And then on top of it, he can't sit there with you while you do it. Okay. So one thing that you could possibly do is record what he's saying. Of course, with permission, right?

Cause y'all married, so it's supposed to be fine. But it, okay, babe, I'm going to just record it. Okay. Okay.

So I can get it. So if I need to hear it again, I can go back and hear it. With that, do you think that that would be a viable thing to help her so that if she needed to review the information, you could go over to the living room and do what you're doing. And then she could listen to this recording of you three times if she wanted to, and you don't have to be sitting right there with her.

It's new, it's different. I understand that. But to get something you've never had, you gotta do something you've never done. What you said is that you want the dynamic between you and your husband to work.

And he wants it too. But there are certain things that you're requesting, certain things that he's willing to give. But there are certain things that he's not willing to give in that way. And there are certain things you're not willing to give too.

We never got to that side. But I would say at least start with that. So that he doesn't get burned out with just being, explaining all the time stuff. Let's get to the business of making the money, right?

So we can get to the business of making the money. He don't mind explaining it, but good Lord, I explained it three times. Now, how does this contribute, how does this translate to us making these sales? So I would say let's start with that.

How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So we can't fix all of it, but I would say let's start with that one thing. I would say identify things that you need to be done. Maybe have a list of things you would like to know.

So for example, let's just say, let me ask this. So let's say you're trying to sell a blog. That's the goal. You're trying to sell Kalaatu Premium or something like this.

That's what you want to do. Right? So what do you want to do? What are you trying to sell?

What is your goal in the business? For us to be earning $100,000 a month. OK. But I mean, by what activity?

Are you doing this from the affiliate standpoint? Like you're going to market and sell the products and you're going to earn it this way? Or is your goal really to service people? Like let's say you find a small business and you want to service small businesses and you want to sell it, true enough.

But you're doing more of a coaching or training, leaning towards that, the affiliate side. So just making sales pretty much online of the products and services that you have available. OK. So what things do you feel that you need to know at this point that you don't know that's prohibiting you from making sales?

I just, I don't know, just staying on track. Not being distracted. Because Cheryl, you don't need to know anything else. You don't.

You are going, my opinion. OK. If I can share this with you. My opinion is that you are self-sabotaging.

You are creating things in your mind that you need to master and learn and do because you've told yourself that you cannot make these sales and you cannot help anybody until you know how to do these things first. So you won't go out and do it because of the fear that if you do it and somebody signs up, they're going to ask you stuff and you don't know how to give them the answer to the stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially if it's related to the computer because you need Steve for that, right? Because there's nothing that you need to know.

That's true. Yeah. There's nothing. I mean, what else do you need to know?

You don't even need to know the computer that much. All you need to know is how to take your lead capture page. Everybody, look. OK.

It doesn't matter whether you're in this business or you're in another business, if you're trying to market anything online and you're trying to do it through an automated process, you need a couple of things, right? What do you need? Product. Blog.

Lead capture page. Autoresponder. Autoresponder. You don't need to sell somebody else's product like you're doing here as an affiliate, OK?

But what you absolutely need is a blog, autoresponder, and lead capture page. That's all you need to know. Now, lead capture page. What's stopping you from getting a lead capture page up?

I'm stopping myself from thinking that I need to be perfect and do it right. OK. What's stopping you from having your autoresponder set up? Well, it's set up.

So it's ready. OK. You got messages in there. OK.

And then what's stopping you from having your blog? It's set up. It's set up. Yeah.

So there's nothing stopping you from doing anything. The three components that you need, you have. And they're set up and they're ready to go. So you got somebody like Steve is like, OK.

Yeah. Going back to what he was saying before about I say that I know everything. I do know. I know what to do.

The thing is just doing it. But he can't help you with that. You can't. You can't have your ace sit right there with you the whole time while you get over the fear of taking a step.

You can't. You understand? Yeah. And I understand.

I need to stop thinking that I need him to be right there to do this because I want us to work together in a business close. You know. So. And then also the idea that just because he's set up.

Yeah. He's not sitting right there next to you does not mean that he's not working with you close. You're saying from a physical standpoint, he's interpreting what you're saying as and even you because you're like, I'm looking at your body language. You like, you know, close.

Right. See, you said about a close. Right. And husband says, we are working close.

We're going to close as I can give you close. Right. I'm over here. I'm doing my skill thing.

I'm jamming. You over here. You're rocking and rolling. What you doing?

I'm over here. I'm doing my skill thing. I'm jamming. You're over here.

You're rocking and rolling. What you doing? Well, how much closer you want us to be? So because he's not sitting right next to you in the office at the computer where y'all got side by side desk, right?

Face to face, whatever, right, whatever. But I'm not even joking because this is how I did me and my ex in our real estate business and our office that we had, we had an office downtown where we had it in our house first. Then we moved to downtown Chicago. Either way.

Well, we were in the house. We were kind of face to face and in our office we were kind of like, I was this corner facing that way and he was that corner facing that way. So we like had a corner, but we were there. We were in the same space, not that close, but proximity were right there.

So from his perspective, it was like, I seen you all day because he is, he's sitting at his desk when we work and he's seeing me all day. But my thing is, yeah, but we're working. I'm not seeing you. I'm seeing you when I'm not seeing you.

Now. I'm going to have a drink, you know, he going out with his friends, right? And so that dynamic is what I'm talking about. Okay.

So we see things differently as women. We do. We were talking about some of this stuff last night at dinner. Right?

Me and how they see stuff is just like, what is absurd? How could they even think that way? That's ridiculous to think that way, but it's the way it is. Right?

And so you're wanting the same things. You're interpreting it differently. He's saying you want clothes. He's giving you clothes, but clothes doesn't look like what clothes in your mind clothes doesn't look like.

That's what you're getting. This is the same thing that people do when they say, Oh God, I'm looking, you know, God going to bless me. God going to bless me with this opportunity and I'm going to be able to pay all my debt and I'm gonna do all this type of stuff. And they get a phone call and say, Oh my goodness, let me tell you, have you heard about this particular business?

I want you to take a look at it. Ah, sound like one of them scams. Okay. Cause it don't look like the blessing in the way you packaging the blessing.

So now you're going to tell God what it's supposed to look like. You ask them for it, but then you're going to tell them how it was supposed to look, what it's supposed to say. You're going to dictate how you receive as opposed to being open and saying, okay, I asked for something. Let me kind of entertain it.

I don't have to do it if I don't feel good about doing it, but don't let me shut it down because this could be the blessing. God is not going to come down with a big sign. Okay. Let me sign in this example and say, Carlton, here's the big opportunity you've been asking me for.

It's not going to happen. You got to have foresight, right? And you got to be willing to receive, be open, right? So you're just not getting it the way it looks to you, but he's giving it to you.

So what you need to do now that it's done easy or just, you can just cut it off, cut it on or off is that you've got to accept that you're getting everything that you want. You want your husband to work with you. He's doing that. You want to work together in the business.

He's doing it. He's asking to help you. He's doing that. He's doing everything.

Now he's asking you for something though. Can we get some results? This was your initiative initially, right? Yes.

You started this business essentially. He supported that whole initiative, right? Or was it together? There was something that he wanted, you know, he wanted to pretty much take over everything and, you know, there's a certain process that we have to follow that he wasn't willing to follow.

Okay. And so I had to say, wait a minute, there's a certain process that we have to follow. Okay. We have our own business and he built it a certain way.

Yeah. And the same way he wanted to build our main business, he wanted to do here, but it didn't work. It's different. Okay.

And so that kind of caused, you know, like, okay, wait a minute. I got to, you know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want us to continue. Adjust? Oh, okay.

No, no. Uh oh. Uh oh. Should we end this right now?

I feel like since we might need to end this, I don't want to get in trouble with y'all later on. Is this okay? We can talk later. No, I'm fine with that.

I think they're fine with it. I'm just saying I don't want y'all to be fussing and then it's all my fault that at the mastermind, I, you know. Oh, that's all wrong. It's all good.

Other people have to learn from their mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So there was a way that things needed to be done. There was a way that an idea that he built, he built it. And he built it. And he built it.

And he built it. And he built it. So you're saying that an idea that he brought to the situation and your viewpoint was that the way that he was existing, the existing way that he did things, he couldn't do them exactly that way. There needed to be an adjustment in the way you were going to approach this business?

Yes, the way he was seeing it. Okay. I was, you know, saying we have the eight core steps that we need to follow. Okay.

But he wanted to implement doing certain things that would pretty much close our business down or whatever. Okay. So, yeah. no so okay we already have a i'm an intermittent marketer right already already okay we've already got a million dollar business yes okay the gross is not in that business yeah you know there are just things i wanted to do that i already have mastered okay and you know just like doing anything sometimes you you try there's trial and error okay and you know it was just running into some errors and trying to navigate through those errors but because i wasn't following exactly the eight core step way you know at the time years ago i wasn't doing it right that's all right so i got kicked to the curb so i just went to the curb and that was it i'm done so this is a dynamic of newbie versus veteran well in the beginning me we both were newbies but he already had he had already he had this he don't know anything about a core commitment at the time and he's bringing to the table the skill set of what built the million dollar business before the eight core commitments it was even an issue is that correct before you knew anything about eight core commitments you already had this business and you're already successful in this business and you were doing whatever needed to be done already in this business you came up with this idea about hey let's do this thing and this thing had these eight core commitments you want to follow eight core commitments because that's structure and as a newer person that's what we like is structure but it's like this is when you are if you're teaching kids how to play basketball right you're going to have the coaches are going to teach the kids the very basics and almost by the book because they have to learn the skill set but if you had lebron talk to one of those kids lebron could say man look you don't even got to do that just do this right it's the shortcut it's the it's the I've been down this roll already and you got to learn the the fundamentals but I'm telling you out of experience out of theory that we could shortcut this and we could do this now the new person now I experienced this with my stepdaughter playing basketball right because her coach is telling her how to do this but all the dads at the game are telling all the girls to do it their way right because all the guys are into the NBA and they're doing it they want them to post up and they want to block it they want to block it they want to block it they want to block it they want to and they want them to be firm and bounce the ball and go up hard for the rebound and slam duck on people when they're 10 years old, right?

But the coach is telling the girls, do this, do that, right? Run to the line, turn around, do this, right? Exactly do that. But dad is saying, hey, man, you got to be able to do it fast.

You got to be able to go. I mean, literally, like, you got to be able to juke the ball, he said. You got to learn to juke. I'm like, okay.

She doesn't have to learn how to juke, but the coach is not interested in juking right now. The coach is interested in her going to the line, doing like this, and being able to turn for the pick. You see what I'm saying? So you're the person that's like, hey, we got the eight core commitments.

No, I'm going to come, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this. And your husband's like, hey, man, just juke the ball. All we got to do is this. And you're saying, no, no, no.

They said do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. He was like, I get that. That's fine. We can do that.

But in the meantime, I'm telling you, let's just do this. And the resistance to that, not that it's bad or good, I understand. I'm just saying that there's got to be a compromise in terms of, okay, he respects that you want to do it by the book, because by the book can't work. It's the fundamentals.

But you've also got to accept the fact that he brings to the table some experience and something that has already generated results in the life that y'all had. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. You even came here. So that's where the compromise comes in.

So if you say, hey, Steve, I need your help with A, B, and C. And then Steve bring you the help, then you can't be like, never mind, Steve. Go on back over there. I shouldn't have asked you, Steve, because that's not about a book, Steve.

Were you there? I told you I kind of knew. I've been in that. Right?

But that's just a personal dynamic. That's why I say it's newbie versus veteran. You want to do it right. You want to be successful.

You want to be successful. want to make sure is you don't want to leave one stone unturned. You want to do everything the way because that's what we say to do. But that's what we have to say to do because you got to learn the fundamentals.

But after you've been on the court for a while, Cheryl, and you've been bouncing this ball a little bit, and you've been in the game a little bit longer, and you've gone through the fundamentals, and you learn how, hey, I can do this this time, but I can do, you have intuition. Then fundamentals are there for structure, but experience becomes the guide, right? So you got your husband who's got some experience with some things. So you may have to, even though it doesn't follow your packaged ACOR commitments in this example, or it may, but slightly outside of it or whatever, you might have to embrace some of that.

And you might just let him bring that to the table. Because what that will do is you're going to have to embrace some of that. And you get you into action because right now what's happening is you're not in action. You're fundamentally sound, but there's no results.

So I'd rather have a little bit out of the box, not totally fundamentally sound, and get results that is ready, fire, aim, which is really what he's after, right? Let's just, we're ready. Okay, great. Let's fire.

Let's just get some stuff out there. And then let's come back and let's readjust. Your thing is, no, no, no, let's ready, but let's aim it first. Let's get it together.

And then let's go. He's not doing, he's like, okay, I ain't got time for that. So you might have to shift into more of a ready, fire, aim, which is what entrepreneurship is about. You can't, there's nothing else to learn.

There's nothing else to set up. And there's nothing else to do. There is nothing on your computer that you need to learn that you have not already learned that is preventing you from getting traffic to a page, getting a lead into an autoresponder, and following up with that lead in that autoresponder and directing them to a sales page that sells a product. There is nothing else that you need to learn that's stopping you from doing that.

Yeah, just a matter of just readjusting, just trusting. Yeah, yeah. And allowing him to do certain things. Yeah.

Without worrying, okay, oh, he's not doing it this certain way. Like, oh my God, it's not perfect the way that David Wood told me. Yeah. It's okay.

Because that, I mean, but you're building the muscle of, that's what entrepreneurship is. Do you know what I'm saying? This is what I'm saying, y'all, about what we're doing. Yeah.

what we're doing. It's an art. It's a science to it too, but it's really an art. It's a free form.

It's in dance. What is it about dance? It's the art form of it. The technical part is that, yes, in ballet, you have first position, second position, third position.

Those are fundamentals. But when you're performing a piece, you are not thinking first position, second position. You are free forming the movement. The movement is fluent throughout all the fundamentals that you learn.

When you do a kick, that kick is called something technically, but when you do it and you do it in a certain type of way, nobody is considering that. You got to let the movements now flow. You know what they are. Let the movements flow.

Trust that your husband has some experience with what's going on. That's why you seek his advice in the first place, because you know he knows the stuff. So now, just let him kind of do some of the stuff. Now, here's the thing.

Steve, you don't hear this part. If it don't work, then you already knew that. I'm just kidding. But you understand what I'm saying?

If it doesn't work, that's right. If it doesn't work, then that's okay too. But then you let the process hone the process.