You don’t necessarily have to believe in “the one” to know the significance on your career of the partner you choose to marry and/or share a life with – or whether you choose to have a life partner at all.
While it could be the biggest career decision you make, it’s always a decision that can be undone: as one woman said to me earlier in the week regarding her first husband, “he was totally wrong for me, I figured that out early on”. She remarried, was much happier and could attribute at least part of the success of her career to the support of her second husband.
Of course, you don’t need to have a great partner to have a great career. But sharing a life with the wrong person could be seriously detrimental. And getting it right could ultimately launch your career in directions you never thought possible.
Yesterday during a chat with Boost Juice founder Janine Allis, she mentioned one of the key turning points of her career was meeting (and marrying within eight months) her husband Jeff Allis – and not just because the two would ultimately prove to be a dynamic duo for growing a business.
Speaking to Allis and hearing about the eclectic mix of work she’d done prior to founding Boost Juice– in advertising, as a stewardess on a yacht, managing a cinema, doing publicity for some of the world’s most famous celebrities – you quickly sense that Allis has the natural confidence to achieve whatever she sets out to achieve.
But she noted that it was her husband who ultimately gave her the support and confidence she needed to believe she could build the mechanics of Boost Juice and grow it into a successful international chain of more than 280 stores.
“I think that people in your life can actually bring out the best and worst in you,” she says. “I see some marriages and there are women or men wanting to burst out of their skin, but they can’t because of the partner they’ve chosen, or perhaps out of fear. They’re not necessarily bad people, but the relationship just leaves them trapped in a box.”
Allis claims her husband always had more faith in her abilities than she did. “He’d say, ‘you can do it, how hard could it be?’ And I’d think, ‘Ok, well because you think I can and because it’s actually pretty hard, I’m going to make it happen’.”
It’s an equal relationship in which she’s spent time supporting his career – particularly during the early stages of their marriage before launching Boost Juice– and he’s supported her.
Plenty of high-profile women have noted how their choice in life partner has helped their career including Helen Conway, former Queensland premier Anna Bligh, Barclay’s Cynthia Wayland and KPMG’s Rosheen Garnon.
So are there rules we can apply to picking the right partner? At a recent Catalyst conference, Xerox CEO and chair Ursula Burns declared that choosing an older partner is key – noting her own husband who is 20 years older than her. The age difference meant that he was ready to retire and stay at home with the kids while she was ready to seriously progress her own career.
That’s not an option for all of us – nor one we’d all want to take.
And when you sense that immediate spark with an individual, considering how they may later affect your career is not always high on the priority list at the time.
But on seeing the spark shift to something more permanent, it’s worth thinking more laterally than the house, kids and mother-in-law when considering the future.