What Living With Another Consultant Is Like
While two swords may not fit into the same sheath, two consultants probably can - in fact, I am married to one and we’ve somehow managed to duke it out together for more than six years.
Sure, we can be at each other’s throats some days but which married couple isn’t? My husband works with a tier-1 consulting firm while I work with the world’s largest professional services by revenue - I am not mincing my words when I say, at times it does get gruesome.
But like good consultants, we keep devising and experimenting with approaches and frameworks that help us stay afloat and keep us going as a couple.
Learning from each other and taking turns to be each other’s cheerleader
Learning and professional skill development happens osmotically when we both work just a few feet away from each other. This is especially important in our profession since we are in a people business where soft skills play an incredible role.
But there’s a good, a bad and an interesting side to it.
The good - We constantly exchange consulting best practices, industry trends and other soft skills that help us become efficient consultants with creative thinking and pithy / succinct communication.
We have also been able to bring the consulting problem solving toolkit into our relationship where in a clinical fashion, we try to nail down our relationship challenges to create a multi-pronged remediation plan that can help us solve problems and attain progress with measurable indicators. Believe me, we’ve used the whiteboard in our house more for personal problem solving than professional.
Communication is key and in case of its breakdown, we try to be as matter of fact as possible by not getting swayed by emotions nor exerting unnecessary circumlocution and getting our point across as clearly as possible (although it’s still work in progress and there’s a lot of room for development!).
The bad - There are days when we both are running on fumes and have little to no time for each other. In fact, sometimes days go by when we don’t even get to speak to one another.
It gets hard sitting next to each other and not being able to talk for days - we’ve normalized (and I’m not proud of it) not being able to talk the whole week some weeks. In lieu of this, we’ve scheduled Friday dinner dates that are cancellable only under extenuating circumstances. We both are deeply committed to going out for the weekly dates and these have become sacrosanct for our relationship.
These dinner dates have helped us enormously in finding our footing as a couple and help us get through our sometimes tumultuous week in great anticipation.
The interesting - We’ve come to become each other’s biggest supporters and cheer each other on when needed. In our line of work, it’s actually quite common to feel like a complete imposter where one can feel incompetent and get inclined to throw the towel in. On such dark days, we’ve vicariously come to understand each other’s energy level and calibrate who needs to be the cheerleader for whom. And so, we take turns to boost each other’s morale and to make the other person see that all is not lost and help them navigate the situation.
We’ve been through a tapestry of emotions - from windfall performance hikes / bonus to hanging by the thread of job insecurity especially in times of economical turmoil. We’ve had hiccups along the way but one thing that has remained constant is us acting as each other’s Rock of Gibraltar in times of need.
