WORKING WITH FAMILY

As you gain experience with the Votta Exercise and see it start to produce positive results in your own life and career, you may wish to share it with others, whether it be family, friends, or members of your team. If you want stuff to deal with all the time, then work with family. As I mentioned earlier, I work with my husband.

When you work with family—a spouse, a parent, adult children, a sibling—and you look back, some- times there can be a lot there. Doing the Votta Exercise can be incredibly valuable, because sometimes it feels like you’ve got a short fuse, for lack of a better​ term. Something can happen that would be seemingly small with anyone else, but because your sister did it, your reaction is much bigger than it would have been otherwise.

I have been working with my husband off and on for as long as I’ve known him, which is over ten years. I love working with him. That said, we are most challenged when our views differ. My husband has a view that no one else works as hard as he does, and I happen to be “no one else”. And I have a view that if something goes wrong, it’s probably my fault. It really made a difference for us to do the exercise and recognize these opposing views and how they play out in our marriage. Each time we did the exercise, there was a different circumstance.

​​Learn more about helping others through The Votta Exercise in my book "Controlling the Pause"!