Building an Intentional Family Structure for Multifamily Investors

In this episode of The Ensaun Experience, we delve into the complexities of family structures for multifamily investors. Faisal Ensaun shares insights on defining clear roles, fostering effective communication, and integrating traditional values with modern dynamics. Discover how intentional family planning can create a supportive, balanced, and successful home life, ensuring both personal and professional growth. Tune in to learn practical strategies for building a family structure that works for you.

Have you ever felt like relationships are holding you back from experiencing your big breakthrough?

Perhaps it's a spouse that doesn't seem to support your mission. Or, maybe, you consistently find yourself dealing with unscrupulous investors who've left you wondering if you are even pursuing the right path.

Relationships are the cornerstone to feeling successful and fulfilled because:

They touch every area of your life.
They impact your decisions.
They influence your emotional state.
They have the power to push you to greater heights, or sink you to lower lows (if you let them.)
High performers make the mistake of thinking they can 'do-it-all alone,' and often end up alone as a result.
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Transcript

0:04

But today I did want to cover family structures. And I want to talk about why it came up. So pretty much, and it's funny, there are seasons where I go through with my clients where certain topics and certain themes keep coming up. I don't know why, how, when. It happens once in a while. And this is the season in the past few months I've noticed More challenges arise in families and more questions around how do I set up my family? And this is an important question to, for us to think about and, and here's what we mean by family structure. So what is your family dynamic like? And if you don't have a family, I want you to actually be conscious about when you do have a family, how are you thinking about setting that up? Now, this would not be even a question for somebody from a few decades ago. Because a few decades ago, we would have only one family structure, and that's a traditional family structure where, um, your, your husband, wife, kids, and the husband is usually running all the outer stuff. The wife is usually running the internal stuff in the family, being with kids and all that stuff. And that, that family structure is still there. And I'll talk a little bit about it, but now there are other forms of it that are coming up. Uh, roles and responsibilities are not clear anymore. Men and women are both working. Uh, the responsibilities of the household are different. What, how do you divide that? How do you make sense of that? And the more I've worked with couples, the more I've worked with people who are either thinking about building families or who have built families, sometimes for years and decades. They have no idea how to approach it. And usually the way we approach it is, however, we've seen it being approached in our families. Sometimes that works. Sometimes that doesn't work for us. And I'll, I'll actually start this with, with me. So, uh, so you understand where my biases are and where I'm coming from with this, because it's very important for us to think about what kind of families we're building. And it also expands towards. How we see our community, other families around us grow, because usually we connect with like minded people, people who have similar values as us. So we connect with those people who have similar values around family. connection and how we deal with each other and so on and so forth. But so I come from a fairly traditional values family. We grew up in a semi religious family in the sense that we have, we have a religion and my parents followed that. They prayed, they taught us, but it was never forced on us. It was up to us how we wanted So, and follow it. There are certain social things that were connected to that. And usually a lot of family values actually come from religion for most people in traditional values stuff. So what? Uh and but here's the challenge that happened. So my parents if you go back home, I was for those who don't know I was born in Afghanistan. If you go back, uh, the in that culture, it's very collective. It's so which means that there are there are individual families, but it's very. For example, there was a time when I was little, we were living with my grandparents in the same region, two separate buildings, but they were with us. Like, we were part of the same family, so my grandparents and sometimes my aunts and uncles would be there and we were there, so it was, the boundaries were much more fluid. And those are, Actually a major, major, a major part of the world is like that even to this day, um, when you go around. But when you go to the more western end, it becomes more individualistic, which means that, uh, nuclear families are more, uh, more dominant. As in you're separate, you have your separate home, you have your separate lifestyle and everything. So, um, as for example, my parents, when they left, Back home, they went to a different place, but they kept some of the stuff, some of the traditions that they had, many of the traditions. In fact, we lived in an apartment building. We where we had my, two of my aunts in front of us. So we were in the same floor, but they were in front of us. And I don't think that was by accident because they were used to that. So they had that in place. Now, here are the advantages of a traditional family, like. Is that you always have somebody around you that looks out for you, and you might have heard this, uh, thing, uh, this statement around, uh, It takes a village to raise a child. And, and we had a lot of parents. We had aunts, uncles, so many people around us. It gives you a sense of safety and comfort, but it also has downsides. Nobody knows who is responsible for who a lot of times. Uh, nobody knows their roles very clearly around children. It's like everybody's kind of your parent, and, and parents could be in their own world you don't know. Um, and, and again, this might be a little bit different in the Western and I'm just sharing my experience of it. So, um, here's what ended up happening because my parents went to a different country, even though we had aunts and uncles and other people somewhat there, they still had to run a home and they weren't well off. They didn't, they couldn't hire a lot of help. So they had to divide the roles and responsibilities at home. And one of the things that I learned, at least for my parents, is that they kind of did divide everything, even though my culture has taught a lot more that a man should just be outside doing outside stuff. Like working outside, taking care of outside stuff, a woman should be taking care of, uh, uh, kids and all that stuff. But, uh, both of my parents actually did that, and I remember my dad would make us breakfast because my mom would be at work daytime. Uh, and then evening time, my mom would make food a lot of times, and then my dad would help a lot of times. And that was actually looked at very irregular, and I think my dad had enough empathy because my mom worked. And they both had to work to sustain us. Now fast forward this a little bit. So now I am with my wife and my siblings have their families and I'm watching how we're trying to create it. There are, there are so many confusions in there. Partly we're all okay to kind of contribute in one way or another, but, and I've kind of gone through different phases of it where I helped a lot more at home, but then I've stepped back because I'm running two businesses. Now I'm focused on that. And in my family with my wife, we both actually mutually decided that she'd be with children more. She does do work, and she's pursuing a very similar path as me, but she is not very career focused. And that's by design because we wanted and we had a value around that we wanted to raise our own children, which means that we didn't want the school system to raise our children. We didn't want the daycare to raise our children. We didn't have a positive relationship with that. Personally, some people do, we just simply didn't. So that made it a little bit simpler. Simpler so we kind of followed that traditional family model in the sense that in the beginning We didn't quite because I was much more involved in the day to day Cleaning and cooking and all that stuff together with my wife But later on as I got more and more busy with business We decided you know what that would make more sense with, uh, with my wife taking care of more of the inside stuff and I was more on the outside. So it naturally went in that direction. But what we also noticed was that our roles became more clear as well. So for us, it made it more simpler where we knew our roles. Now, that doesn't mean that if I need to cook something and I actually like cooking for my kids, I will do that. And we've also hired help. We can, we can afford to do that. So sometimes there's somebody helps us with cleaning. We have a gardener, we have a bunch of people that helps us out too. So in that sense, it's simpler as well. But when you look at our home with two kids and, um, and as the family expands, that's the thing, the complexity increases and we're always thinking about. Thinking about how do we make decisions about purchasing stuff, about investing, about how our family should run. And we have had to do a lot of thinking. And the reason why I brought this up is because almost every time I talked to somebody, how do you run your home? They haven't actually consciously thought about it and they've kind of like us evolved, but, but they don't know why it's working the way it does and the downsides of it. And I'll talk about it. There are families that run it kind of in the modern sense, and this The modern way is that both men and women are involved in your life. Because both have careers, both are pursuing a path. But here's where things get very weird. Um, for example, when you look at some families, um, Men and women both work, and they're both involved, But for some reason, uh, uh, Some of the older traditional stuff is kept where the man will be like, No, I don't do anything inside. Well, then that requires you to not allow the woman to work or not allow not in that sense, but give her the space so she has the energy to run the family and she doesn't need to work unless she wants to work, but the woman works. And also, uh, the man doesn't want to do the inside work because the certain traditional models are still with that man. And that creates a problem. And I know I'm repeating man, woman, all that stuff a lot, but I have to kind of do that in order to make sense of this in the world. Nobody talks about this stuff these days. It sounds odd when you even talk about it. So why is that important? The reason why it's very important is that it, it, it, it affects the quality of your life, because if you as partners, you're both running a home and on top of that, you're building businesses, you're building lots of things. How are you going to run all this? If the roles are not clear. Real clear. This is why I veer more, a little bit more towards the traditional. Why? Because the roles become very clear for the most part. I'm very outside focused. I take care of outside stuff, whether I hire somebody, I do it. I've chosen to hire, for example, a gardener because I don't want to spend time on that. I'd rather spend time on my business. That's my, there are a lot of things that I, I like, there's some things that I will fix here and there, but if it takes more than half an hour, one hour, I'll hire somebody to do it. That's just the personal decision I've made, but I'm responsible for that. I'm responsible for the cars, for our motor home, for anything that breaks down. I'm responsible for that inside the house or outside. Usually food. My wife is responsible for that. She takes care of that. Uh, and she's, and she's a great cook. She had to learn to become a great cook. She wasn't that much in the beginning, but she had to learn, but now she's amazing. She actually enjoys the process and almost everything related to the kids is. But when I come home in the evening, I'm with the kids. I'm spending time with them. If I need to help with everything else, I will help. So I've adapted some of the modern aspects of life to because I, I can see she's exhausted. She needs a break and I want to spend time with the kids too. So she can take a little bit of a break, a breather to go do herself. But the danger comes in where in a lot of families that I'm noticing is that both men and women work. But then when, when the man comes home, he doesn't know, he doesn't contribute. He just goes off and does something else, but it's not an agreed upon thing. It's either going out with somebody or maybe started a new business, but it's not communicated very well. And you can see that both men and women are frustrated because their roles are not clear and they don't know how to communicate that they're both tired. And usually this is how it looks like. If men and women are not connected, um, uh, the, the husband or wife, they come home and the other one is at home and one of them will say, Man, today I was exhausted. He's like, oh, you think you're exhausted? Watch how This is how exhausted I am. Now they compete over who's more exhausted versus be like, Oh, you're exhausted. All of a sudden it's been really hard. What happened? Tell me a little bit more. Yeah, it was a tough day for me too, but how can we support each other? It's team effort. And ultimately whatever model you're following is the team effort there. And it comes down to the feeling. Do you feel supported by your partner? Whether it's in the chores, whether it's in the responsibilities outside a lot of, for example, investors, they tend to want their partners being involved one way or another. It might not be in the business. Sometimes it is, but do you feel like you support, feel supported in your efforts as a team, whether it's being supported with kids at home? Or being supported outside. And if you don't have kids, then you can still divide the responsibilities. But again, my, my thought process here is have you actually consciously thought about these things or you've kind of. You're following a model and evolving with it without thinking much about it, because if you're not consciously thinking about it, the problem happens, um, where one person or both people might be feeling frustrated and resentment comes up. And when resentment comes up and it builds up over time, that creates problems in marriages and relationships. Now, I won't go into the other models where a lot of people are getting divorced. Now you have One set of kids coming from another marriage into this new marriage, that complicates things even more. How does that work? Again, the bottom line is I don't have experience there. I've seen a lot of my clients, they've struggled with this process. But the point here is intentionality. If you actually sit down and think about your home a lot like an organization you're running, how would you ideally run it? How would each person's needs be met in that home and what are the values and the culture of your own family? And this is beyond the culture that you grew up when the religion that you grew up and the values of the bigger culture and religion will come into it. But how do you specifically want to run your family and values? And because we are in a world where values and traditions now differ, people are thinking in different ways about different things. For example, my siblings and I were five of us. We all run our homes very differently. It's similar, but we all have very specific family cultures that are very different from each other. And, and we don't quite agree to run it in the, in the same exact way as the other person, but we, we kind of accept it for what it is that we have adapted to our own way of doing it. Now, the question is, does it work for you? If you are running a family where you feel like you feel supported, it could be challenging, it could be tiring, but you feel supported, you feel understood. You feel like the other person is working with you as a team member, especially your life partner. You feel like your kids understand if you have kids. They understand that you're working like a, like a team versus two people against each other. If that's not the case, guess what happens that affects your ability and business outside that affects how you connect with people outside because you carry that, that frustration, that energy and other relationships. So that you even noticing it a lot of times. And for example, I've had people when I would talk about my family and these are in business meetings like, Oh, that must be really nice. Now. I could tell there's a, there's a little resentment within it that they don't have that, but they didn't say anything else, but that affects my relationship with that person. Why would somebody say that? Why wouldn't that person be happy? Why wouldn't that person be, uh, be supportive of what I've gone through if they're my business partner or team member? So ultimately what I'm getting you guys to think about is whether it's for right now, Or in the future, what kind of family structure are you running? Have you thought about it? Are you intentional about it? And have you gotten your partner involved in the thinking process? Because most people just follow along whatever was given to them and they just carry it and it might or might not work, which is back to the same thing. If you want something to work, you have to actually work at it from a design point of view. What do we want to create? Do we want our life to be fast paced? Do we want our life to be slow paced? Do we want our kids to understand, for example, our traditions from the past? Do we want our, our, our, our family to be, to have more respect and love with each other? Or do we want our family to, to value more individual approaches? Whatever the case is, It has to be thought about and it has to be intentionally at the experiment with it. And a lot of people don't spend enough time doing that. A lot of times we get stuck. We not stuck. We get busy with work outside. We get busy with business, but we forget that actually your family life, your home life is much more complex. There are emotions, there are needs, there are things that you need to address that are probably not addressed right now. And by the time you address them, 10 years, 15 years later, it might be too late or it might be too complex to deal with it. There's a phrase that Tony Robbins talks about is that, um, I think he puts it this way, um, Kill the monster when it's tiny. Don't let it become a giant. And the monster could be the challenge that you're dealing with. And I'll leave it at that. And I'm actually very curious. Uh, there was a third one that, that I was going to share. Actually, maybe I will share it. It will sound very controversial. It's the woke model. And the woke model, I have a little bit of a bias against it. It's because there is no model. There is no tradition. They, they, they, it's kind of based on all sorts of weird ideologies people, people have picked up around inclusivity and environmental activism and all sorts of stuff. And that's coming to people's families. What does that mean for building the kind of family that you mind, that you want to create? It has very little basis towards that. And a lot of times I think women fall victim to that in the sense that they want their life, and I won't go too deep into it, but a lot of them don't even know how to build a family because they follow certain ideologies that are given to them in the modern, modern world. But ultimately, human family is human family. It doesn't matter which culture you come from, the strategies will be different, but it needs to work in the context of you, a family system needs to be able to create a peaceful environment, an environment where people feel connection, support, understanding, an environment where people can grow and meet their needs, they can be educated, and they get to go out there and serve other people and contribute to society in a better way. In fact, there's a, there's a quote that I've shared often here is that the family is the initiation into the world. However, we are out in the world is actually a product of how we are in our past families with our parents and our current families that we create right now. And that requires actually a lot of work and a lot of leaders put much less, much less time than they should in their own families, but they will go be very, they will have a lot of conviction around how people should be in the outside world. But it starts with our own families. How do we do that? And it's not an easy thing. And I don't have judgment in the sense that, Oh, you should run your family one way or another. All I'm saying is, does it work for you? And have you thought about it consciously? Do you have intention? Do you watch what's working? What's not. And most people either just kind of follow other people's models or copy somebody around them. I don't think that's enough. Uh, there needs to be more thought that needs to be put on this thing.