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What do you say to yourself about your ability to learn, change, and grow?
Do you tell yourself you are not a good student? Do you tell yourself you are only good a a few specific things?

Meet Kris McPeak

Kris McPeak is an author, educator, podcaster, and 9-to-5 Side Hustler.  Her show, Elevate Your 8, helps career professionals and entrepreneurs find Time Freedom.  The Elevate Your 8 philosophy is simple:

• honor your work-life alignment by working only 8 hours a day
• honor your wellness by sleeping 8 hours every night
• The Other 8 Hours – GRAVY.  It’s all mathematics and prioritization. 

By day, Kris works for a community college foundation.  In her downtime, Kris runs a non-profit US Masters Swim Team with her hubby, manages her podcast, and enjoys knitting and swimming

Check out Kris’ website, podcast, and give her a follow on Facebook and Instagram.

In This Podcast

Summary

• Why she changed career paths in midlife
• How Kris finds work/life balance
• Life lessons leading to independence and resiliency
• How she keeps her marriage strong while running a business with her husband

Why she changed career paths in midlife

Kris found herself advancing her roles in college residence halls. She started as a Resident Assistant and eventually landed a position as director. Kris felt that her calling was to work with students living on campus. However the demands of more difficult student cases began to interfere with her work/life balance. Kris opted to accept a position in the fundraising sector that allowed her to apply her transferable skills in a different career field.

How Kris finds work/life balance

Kris builds her morning, afternoon, and evening routine. Mornings entail more creativity, personal self care, meditation, journaling, and a bit of the business she runs with her husband. Her afternoon, and especially her lunch hour, is also very intentional. That’s when Kris can engage in some of her more frivolous activities, such as watching a TV show, knitting, or going for a walk. Kris uses evenings to invest in more business-related tasks, like email newsletters or balancing the books. These are activities that might not be as fun, but need to be done.

Life lessons leading to independence and resiliency

When Kris’ husband committed to completing a triathlon, she agreed to join him. That meant that at 47 Kris learned how to swim, despite barely going in water in the past. Thankfully, her husband was a swim coach and had competed in swim meets years prior. Kris was able to go from a modified doggy paddle to learning all four swim strokes. From being terrified of dipping her chin into the water to collecting a handful of ribbons from swim meets. After accomplishing one stroke and no longer fearful, Kris proved to herself through her actions that she could continue learning more.

How she keeps her marriage strong while running a business with her husband

Since Kris and her husband run their swim business together, it was essential that flexible boundaries be in place. While they recognize they are both hard-headed, patience, forgiveness, and meeting in the middle helps them succeed. Kris acknowledges when she’s in the water and her husband is on deck, she listens to him as coach and instructor. When there’s a weekend without swim business, they will go out to eat or meet up with friends. And even though the swim business is her husband’s full-time job, Kris mainly supports on the administrative side so that she can juggle her day job and podcast.

Blueprint to Thrive Quickstart

This week’s podcast episode is about Learning/Self-Growth Domain. When we are satisfied within our domains we are satisfied with our lives. When we are not satisfied within our domains we are stagnant, unfulfilled, anxious or depressed. The importance of the Learning & Self-Growth Domain is often overlooked. We are not fully alive unless we are growing and evolving. To find out the domains in which you are satisfied and the domains that could use your attention, click here for your free Blueprint to Thrive Quickstart. Within a couple of minutes this assessment will show you which direction to head to get to a more satisfying and fulfilling life. Click here for your free Blueprint to Thrive Quick Start.

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Useful links:

• 5 Tips to Stop Overwhelm and Get More Done | IT 046
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• Imperfect Thriving on Instagram
• Imperfect Thriving Free Email Course (Your Blueprint To Thrive)

Podcast Transcription

Kathryn:

Welcome to the show, Kris, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. 

Kris:

I’m happy to be here and thanks for your patience in our rescheduling snafus. 

Kathryn:

Listen we gotta be flexible, don’t we?

Kris:

We do, so true. 

Kathryn:

If there’s anything I’ve learned, that is it. So I know just a little bit about you, but for those of my listeners who haven’t been introduced to you or your podcast yet, catch us up a little bit. Tell us how you got to where you are today. 

Kris:

Sure. Well, I started my career in higher education working in college residence halls and housing complexes. And so if that doesn’t mean anything to you, if you think the word dorm, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I did that from a live-in RA to a live in hall director, to an area coordinator all the way up to director. And that’s where I thought my calling was, to work with students who were living on campus. But I reached a point where, it’s such a high touch field. I was away from working with students every day and it was more like I was working with people that were discipline cases or had mental health issues and the demand on my time after the workday was just getting increasingly more difficult and harder to balance.

Because I still wanted to be able to go home as close to five o’clock as possible and enjoy my evenings and my weekends with my family and my friends. So as the demands got a little bit higher, I started thinking about more ways to take care of myself and take care of my family.

And I thought, well, there’s a couple of things going on here. I can either really start advocating for work-life balance, or I can leave the field. And I didn’t really want to leave the field right away because I did feel very strongly that the work I was doing was important and it did feel like a calling, so, okay.

Let’s put some more focus on the work-life balance. So my very last job in campus housing, I worked for a gentleman who was very well respected in the field and is a beautiful person, but he was very much like 60, 80 hours a week. Going through your emails on the weekends and I felt like I was being smothered.

And I was like, I can’t do this anymore. So I opted to look for something different and I landed a community college advancement. So the fundraising sector with literally zero fundraising experience. All I’d ever really done was like team and training. Let’s, you know, raise some money for cancer, but that was very different than the field I’d gotten into.

So I’m a firm believer that translatable skills will allow you to land in a different career field. Even if you don’t think that you have the experience needed, and I’ve been doing that job now for more than seven years. So it paid off well for me. In the midst of all that I was introduced to Allison Melody of the Food Heals podcast.

She started in a mastermind group back then. It was just a one day event. But it was everybody 45 minutes in a hot seat. And by that time I had written two books, one about work-life balance. One about time management. And as I was describing my books to this group of women, they were all like, you need to start a podcast.

This is something that’s really important in the word needs to get out. So I just kinda went from there and through Allison and I got to know Adam Schaeuble, and that is how you and I became acquainted. So that gets us caught up to now.  Adam is great, really supportive and super helpful and just the right kind of influence that you want if you want to do something well and not have it suck the life out of you. 

Kathryn:

Yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple things that I want to dig into that you that you said. One is that I love that you were kind of thrust into a job that was completely different than the one that you had before and you transferred your skills to it.

Did you have any limiting beliefs or any hesitation as you moved from that one thing that you knew so well, to the other thing that you thought you knew nothing about?

Kris:

Yeah, I guess at first I thought like my learning curve was going to be really high and it wound up not being that way because I was still on a college campus and I was still doing things that benefited students.

So I basically just had to learn a little bit vernacular, what are the fundraising buzzwords? I was tasked originally with building a scholarship program for my foundation. They were pulling all their funds back from financial aid. So that came very easily to me cause I’d been good at program management.

I’d been good at program development and making those things work. And I love professional development and I love learning new skills. So as things about my job expanded, my supervisor say things like, Oh I just feel like we’re overwhelming you, and giving you too much to do. And I’m like, no, like pile it on.

Cause these are all new skill sets. And nothing that you’re asking you need to do is, making me uncomfortable or overwhelmed. So. The fact that I was continuously learning day after day, month after month, year after year, was reallyempowering for me. So in spite of the fact that I came in thinking like wow, I can’t believe they hired me and my learning curve is going to be so high.

It’s been a pleasantly, easy transition and super fun. 

Kathryn:

Yeah. So for you having more to do is not overwhelming, but having it stretch into all of your personal time is. It’s not really about the amount of it. It’s about the expectation to kind of be on 24/7. 

Kris:

That is the downside of some of those campus responsibilities, because loco parentis was there and then it went away for a while and then I feel like it came back.

So there was definitely the notion that I sent my kid to your school because you’re going to take care of them now, but they’ve come to school not being fully equipped to act mildly as an adult. So you guys there at the institution are going to be tasked with doing all that.

And I don’t know. I just have never ascribed to that as being my philosophy. My dad drove me to college and unloaded the car and helped me kind of move into my room and took me to lunch. And then took off. I never called him about a roommate problem. I never asked him to intercede on my behalf with a faculty member or anything like that.

And there is a lot of that that goes on today. So I think the need that I had based on the way my dad raised me to figure shit out by myself and obviously call home if you’re completely stuck, but I never would have asked my dad to do the work for me. And he never would have, he would have told me to go jump in the lake.

So it was very easy for me to get into the career that I got into, secondly, with this advancement stuff, because I’d always been taught to figure stuff out on my own and make the best of it and ask questions when you get stuck. That has worked for me very well.

Kathryn:

Yeah, it sounds like that that was way of parenting and that philosophy of parenting, letting you figure it out on your own led you to the place where in between jobs, you weren’t freaking out and limiting yourself about it. You’re like, eh, yeah, it’s different, but I can do different. 

Kris:

Yeah. 

Kathryn:

Versus now I’m hearing that as parents are dropping their kids off for college, they’re not really leaving them there.

Kris:

No, not really. And you know I think it’s great that there are parents that are as involved with their kids and their activities and extracurricular stuff and things like that. But think there’s a point where mom and dad have to be willing to let their kid be a grownup and make some of those grownup mistakes on their own because there will come a time where, you can’t call home anymore and have your dad like, try to talk the bank out of that overdraft charge. Like you’re going to have to figure out how to do that yourself. You’re gonna have to register your car for yourself. You’re gonna have to pay your bills for yourself. This is how we become fully functional adult members of society.

That’s what my dad always told me. He’s like, I don’t care if he graduate from college. I don’t care if you finish whatever, I don’t care. If you like it, just whatever you decide to do now that you’re not living in my house, I just want to know that you’ve become a fully functioning adult member of society.

And that has stuck with me because college is not for everybody. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you continue to live at your parents’ house for the rest of your life. It’s like you leave the home and you find your own life and figure that stuff out. 

Kathryn:

I love that your dad was. Your dad sounds like he’s a very, very smart, man. It seems so simple, but it’s really not because I think society, especially on our generation, when we were having children was sort of heaping on us that we are supposed to give them the best of everything, do everything for them, set them up for this thriving life.

But the irony there is that if we do all of that and they never fail along the way, they aren’t set up for a thriving life. 

Kris:

Yeah. It’s so true. It’s so true. I can remember my dad making me choose between athletics and cheerleading in my junior year. Cause I did both on my sophomore year and I had a bad trimester in the winter when I did cheerleading for basketball.

My grades did slip. My dad said, okay, well, we’ve gotta change our priorities. So for your junior year, you can do athletics or you could do cheerleading. I chose athletics. And I got my stuff figured out and then my dad was kinda like, okay, well, senior year, I want you to do all of the things, whatever is going to fulfill your final year.

And it was a great year. I did really well, was successful in a lot of things. I got scholarships to college and the whole nine yards. But my dad would continued to say years and years and years after that happened, he’s like, ah, I can’t believe I did that to you. Like that was just the worst thing I could ever do as a father.

I’m like, are you kidding me? Like you taught me how to prioritize and how to figure out what are the important things and to get my head squared on straight. And I continue to thank him until pretty much until the day he passed away, because I thought that was one of the best lessons he ever taught me. 

You’re going to have to make hard decisions sometimes. And if you really, really want to do something, you’ll figure out the way to do it and to do it well and to do it comfortably. So it was an incredible lesson for me.

Kathryn:

I think so too. I hate that he beat himself up for. We are going to find something to beat ourselves up for, if we think about it long enough and hard enough.

So I say, let’s put it out of our minds. Tell me about your two books. 

Kris:

Sure. Well it was one of those things where I thought, like I was wanting to do it and as you learn more and more about Amazon and the world of self publishing and stuff like that. It’s like, this is really going to be that hard to do.

So as I was having that whole epiphany about the work life balance thing, it was at the same time in that final housing job of my housing career. I applied to be in a second master’s program in recreation management. And my intro class was a class on introduction to leisure, adult leisure and theories and stuff like that.

So we had to do a presentation to our class about a certain aspect of leisure. I got all wrapped up in this notion of people not taking vacation days and people working all these extra hours of the week and not choosing to have leisure time. And it was around that time and all this studying and research that I did made me think like, okay, well, this argument would make a really good book in helping people make some of those critical choices – am I going to live to work or am I going to work to live? So that research was the first book called “Making Work Work for You.”

As I started thinking more about how the concept of work life balance affects our time management and our productivity, I was talking with a colleague of mine one day and I said, you know, I think the real key to time management is just like the other eight hours of the day.

Cause if you’re honoring your work life balance. And you’re only working eight hours daily. You’re honoring your wellness and you’re getting a full eight hours of sleep at night. Then if you do the math around that what’s left, is eight hours. If you are “elevating that eight,” then you’re making the best of the rest of that time time during the day.

And then on the weekends, you double the extra eight since you’re not working, but you keep the sleep thing going. And yeah, that was the second book. That was the book that had almost been out at the time that I went to that mastermind group at Allison’s house. And I had everybody telling me like, Oh my gosh, you need a podcast.

This is exactly the kind of thing that people want to hear and blah, blah, blah. So super inspirational. 

Kathryn:

I love that elevate your eight became the name of your podcast. So I’m dying to know exactly how you elevate your eight, share with us, how you get the most out of your work life balance and elevate those other eight hours in the day.

Kris:

Yeah, sure. Well, I’ve sort of built the morning, the lunch and the evening routine into the day. And when I’m truly on, my husband and I are swimmers and we have our own masters swim team. We get up really early so that we can be at the pool by six, but I take that extra hour in the morning to kind of dig into my personal self care meditation, little bit of journaling, and then I’ll work on some aspect of the business. So it might be that I’m updating the roster for the team or I’m paying a bill for the team or I’m working on social media for the team. Or I might edit a show. I might work on Canva and get some promotional materials taken care of.

I do that some of those things in the morning eat some breakfast and head to the head to the pool. And then I’ve always been really intentional about my lunch hour. Cause I used to walk. I used to do a half hour walk around my campus and then I would eat my food. And then I started getting back into TV shows again.

My husband and I do not like the same TV shows. So usually if I want to watch something that I want to watch before we got a second television, I had to do that at lunch. Then lunchtime became the time that I could engage in some of my more frivolous entertainment things. So I would watch a show and I would do some knitting  while I’m watching that show might fiddle around on social media, do some stuff there.

And then most nights after work, I’ve got an hour or so where I will invest in business related things. So I’ll do my email newsletters, I’ll do balancing the books for the swim team at night, and those types of things. So more creative stuff happens in the morning because that’s where I tend to be at my best.

I’m definitely better in the morning than at night. So at night is where I would spend time doing the things that aren’t as much fun, but they’re still necessary to do. So that’s been my practice.  I talk a lot about the morning, the lunch and the evening routine in the book and on the show. It’s brought me so much clarity about time and prioritizing things and making sure that the day that something should get done is the day that it’s actually getting done. I’m a huge fan of Sarah Knight and her books. And, when she wrote, “Get Your Shit Together,” it’s just as much about productivity and time management is as it is about organization.

And she says things like you have to lobby for your hobby. So you have to be the one putting the effort into creating the time that you need to do the things that you want to do. And so I’ve definitely embraced a lot of her philosophy in that, in that aspect, but you talk about and imperfectly thriving.

There are some mornings where I don’t have the energy to go into the morning routine, but I choose that. And I know that there will come a time in the near future where I’ll have to make another adjustment and take care of those things that I’m missing. But that’s a choice that I’ve made.

It’s not that, Oh, I didn’t have enough enough time to do something. I have to be able to look at myself in that mirror and say, Kris, you’re choosing today to not work on the business in the morning. Or you’re choosing today, not to go to the pool. Then I have to accept the consequences of those choices.

When we can do that and be honest with ourselves and elevate your eight is not a difficult thing to do. It’s more about figuring out how long it takes you to do stuff, determining what the important things are, making the choices, the decisions, and then living with the consequences.

Most of the time I’m not living with bad consequences because I know that the choice that I’m making is something that I want to do.

Kathryn:

Agreed. It’s all about being mindful and intentional with your time. When you’re mindful and intentional, then you can prioritize within that intention, put forth your energy toward the most important things all the way down.

Kris:

Yeah, absolutely. 

Kathryn:

I don’t know what I did with my life before I had a morning mindfulness routine and you and I have something in common, I’m going to the pool every day early right now, but I don’t get in the pool. I take my son. Because of COVID and the way our schedules are rearranged, we get time in the morning before school, but I’m getting my exercise in and my morning mindfulness while he’s in the pool.

And I do love to sleep a little bit later than 4:45. I do take advantage of that a couple of days a week, but honestly, I don’t feel as good as when I get up and I get that as first thing. It just really gets me motivated and gets that blood pumping. So now I want to know what are the kinds of TV shows that you like, that your husband doesn’t like?

Kris:

Really dark, heavy things that are brooding or angry. I love Dexter. I loved the Fargo mini series. I loved House of Cards. I will watch a comedy like Big Bang Theory was something that was enjoyable for me, but I like the drama shows that are hard and heavy and not uplifting.

Kathryn:

I’ve gone through a phase with that myself. And so what about, have you seen Ozark? 

Kris:

I have seen season and one of Ozark. I let my Netflix lapse, while we were kind of tweaking some stuff around with subscriptions, but everybody has told me that season three is the thing.

So I’m going to have to make some swaps here and get that on the plate. 

Kathryn:

I like Ozark and I like Yellowstone. Not everybody likes that. It’s got some really dark stuff in it and some heavy stuff in it. It’s kind of like Dynasty or Dallas, but on steroids with much better scenery.

Kris:

And it’s a Kevin Costner show, right?

Kathryn:

Yes. And I love him. 

Kris:

Yeah. I should probably, when I’m done getting caught up with HBO things, I’ll drop the HBO and I’ll go back back to Netflix for a couple months.

Kathryn:

 And Big Little Lies. 

Kris:

Yeah. I read that book first, before I checked out the seasons series. 

Kathryn:

Little Fires Everywhere.

Kris:

That I’ve not seen, that’s Hulu right? 

Kathryn:

I can’t keep it straight. I can’t remember. That might be Hulu or it might be Apple TV. Anything with Kerry Washington in it, I’m in. 

Kris:

I was a huge Scandal fan. A huge Scandal fan. 

Kathryn:

Tell me about your swim team. 

Kris:

Yeah that’s really my husband’s vision and journey, and I’m kind of along for the ride, but because I feel strongly the way he does about adults learning to swim.

That was an important thing of identity for us, I suppose. My hubby was a swimmer in high school and had a really great high school career. But everything else in the high school was unpleasant. So when he graduated, he kind of took a hiatus and it was a very long hiatus.

When I met him, he was bartending and managing bars. He had taken up smoking and he was a fairly heavy drinker and that kind of continued through for 15 or so years of our marriage. He’s HIV positive and he had gotten really sick and the idea of getting healthier started going through his head again.

And I remember him telling me he was getting some treatment in Southern California. We were still living in Northern California and he happened to catch on television, he was laying in bed. He’d had his treatments for the week. He wasn’t feeling really good, just kind of, hanging out and he happened to catch the Kona Championships, Iron Man championships here or something like that. And he got really excited and inspired by that notion. And he called me up and he says, I want to do a triathlon. I’d always known that swimming was his thing. And I reminded him cause he would say I don’t run chased.

And I would say, well, Charles, tri means three. So there’s three sports, so you’re going to have to run and he’s like, I don’t care. I want to do this. I feel like I need to do this. So I told him that I would do one with him. And he reminded me, Kris, you know that triathlon includes swimming. And I had been one of those people, like do not put me in the water.

I will go near the water and I will go on a boat, but I won’t go in the water. I was a runner at the time. So we kinda worked together, to figure out, the sports that the other person was lacking in. And we did our first triathlon in February of 2013. At that point I was still doing like the paddling kind of modified dog paddle in the water to do my first triathlon, which was a reverse triathlon.

So it was only about 200 meters in the pool, which now I think about that and we do six times that in a warmup sometimes. We got through that and then we’d relocated back to Southern California and Charles became a coach for a team to end AIDS, which was one of those like team and training groups where you raise money and then everybody competes in an endurance event.

He had that experience and was doing really well with the coaching piece. So he finally just said, Kris, I want to start my own masters swim team. And I said, cool. Let’s let’s do it. I had written one book. I had not written the second one. There was no podcast yet but he felt really strongly about having the swim team.

So we started the team we applied for our first adult learn to swim grant. We were given a grant, and we started expanding the team. It was first just a handful of triathletes who wanted to get better at swimming, but we started attracting the serious fitness swimmers, the competitive swimmers. Charles went back and started competing in swim meets again, which he hadn’t done in 15, 20 years.

I said well I could get in the water and do a little bit more of this than just cheering everybody on at a swim meet. And I wanted to feel what it would feel like to compete. He taught me all the strokes and I mean, I’m not a great swimmer, but I’ll get a handful of ribbons on a swim meet every now and then.

There’s so much fun to it. It’s a really exciting sport to watch. There’s so much strength and power in it. But there’s still like there’s grace and beauty in it as well. We’ve had the team since 2017. Like I said earlier, Charles has taught way over a hundred adults to swim through this program.

We both feel strongly about the water safety aspect of what he does with that team. Anything that we can do to prevent the whole drowning thing it’s really interesting to think that, I don’t know what the stat is. It’s like only 25% of the adults in the United States can swim like a full length of a pool and that stuff’s mindblowing to me.

So it’s been really fun. It’s been challenging and sometimes it’s very hard to run a business with your spouse. We’re both pretty hardheaded. And we’re both pretty stubborn and a lot of times that works in our favor cause we’re able to get things done. But you know, it’s tough, it’s a lot of work. But I would not trade it for anything because it’s been one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever done. And it’s beautiful because it’s something that we do together. 

Kathryn:

I definitely want to ask a little bit more about how y’all run the business together, but how old were you when you learned when he taught you all four strokes?

Kris:

I was 47. 

Kathryn:

Oh my gosh. I just think that’s amazing because I mean, I come across it all the time with my clients in midlife. They think they’re washed up that the voice in their head is telling them I can’t learn anything new. I can’t do anything new. My best years are over. And then at age 47, you learn the butterfly breaststroke. Like first of all, swimming is my favorite sport. I’m more impressed with swimmers, I think, than anyone else in this world. Yes, part of it is because I have two children that do it and I understand the dedication it takes.

Especially now that we have to get up so early and do it before school. My hats off to you, like all four strokes at age 47. I absolutely loved that. And I hope that inspires everyone who’s listening today to rethink about how they talk to themselves when incomes to learning new things. 

Because, I mean, what did that feel like for you when you went from really doggy paddling to learning all four strokes to where you could compete in them. 

Kris:

Yeah, well, it was terrifying initially because I was borderline afraid of the water. I mean, splashing around and all that was fine, but now, Kris to do freestyle correctly, you have to keep your chin down and keep it in the water.

I’m like, no, I don’t put my face in the water. He’s like, well, Kris, that’s not really how it works. I resisted for a really long time, mostly out of fear, because I was afraid of getting water in my nose or I was afraid of having a little bit of choking going on.

And I think I was just as much afraid to like it and to want to compete, because that would mean that he was right and I was wrong. You know how that goes sometimes with your spouse. Really I mean, when I think of all the amazing things Charles and I have done together over 26 years of marriage.

I think that starting this team together has been one of the best things we’ve ever done. And I’m so grateful to him for hit the patience and understanding that he put into teaching his spouse how to swim. Because I know it was not easy. In that capacity, I’m not a good student and I resisted a lot. That’s just a testament to what a good coach and swim instructor. 

Kathryn:

That’s a Testament to both of you because I don’t think it’s easy on either end. 

Kris:

Yeah it was scary. The first day that I ever swam a full length of the pool, I like broke out crying and I wanted him to hug me. I was just so excited about the fact that I had done that. But once you get one stroke down and then it’s like, okay, well, let’s move to this next thing, because this is the next natural. Butterfly was what I learned last and it’s not my favorite. Because it’s not what it looks like.

It’s very different actually doing the movements then if you’re watching how they’re done. So like things that I thought were the right thing to do because of the way you watch it on television, it’s like, no, no, no. We’re not smiling for the camera. We want to put that head right back down and, and those types of things.

It’s been a really great time in my life, learning an absolutely brand new spanking new thing that had always petrified me before. And now I love it. I don’t really want to do anything else for exercise other than maybe a little bit of yoga every now and then.

Kathryn:

I would imagine once you got over the hump of learning the first stroke, there was a sense of accomplishment that kept you going. That made you think a little bit more and a little bit more, “maybe I can do this.” You were proving to yourself by your actions that you could do it. 

Kris:

And that, that’s one of the most empowering things in the whole world to be able to say to yourself, like I’m well equipped to do this and the fear is not there anymore.

So I’m just gonna do it. 

Kathryn:

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love that. So now that y’all are running this business together, what has that been like for you as a couple? Have y’all had to set up some ground rules with each other or some boundaries between business talk and all of that, and then personal, like how do y’all make that work within your marriage?

Kris:

Well it’s hit or miss and some days are better than others. I’ve tried to sort of isolate certain aspects of the business to only certain times of the day or the weekend.Or like, if it’s a weekend where there’s no swim business taking place and maybe like, let’s not talk about the business this weekend.

Let’s do other things. Let’s go out to eat. Let’s see some friends let’s just hang out at home. But sometimes it’s hard when. Not only like you’re doing the business with your life partner and you also happen to live together and y’all sleep in the same bed. And sometimes it just comes up in conversation and it’s not like I can say no stop it’s after 7.

We don’t talk about swimming after 7. For him, it’s his full time job. I have my day job and I have the swim team and then I have the podcasting on top of that. So, Charles definitely has more mental energy to put in it than I do. And we’re pretty well split in terms of like I’m the administrative side of things.

So in terms of like philosophy, the coaching and how to do instruction in the pool and stuff like that’s all him. And I’m not, I don’t have my hands in that. When he’s on deck and I’m in the water, he’s coach husband. And I’m the same as any other swimmer in the water, which means I have to not talk when the coach is trying to give instructions on what the workout is and stuff like that.

It’s not easy. It takes a lot of work. A lot of patience, a lot of forgiveness, a lot of meeting in the middle. For me, someone who’s pretty hard headed. We both have to finally say, okay, I’m not the right one here.

You’re right. So I’m going to concede to you that you are the one that knows more about this particular aspect. And so now I’m listening, so you can tell me your thoughts on it and we can make that thing happen. 

Kathryn:

There’s some firm boundaries and some, sort of clear knowing about he’s the wet side, you’re the dry side.

And very clear on your roles and boundaries, but flexible with the boundaries when you need to be. 

Kris:

Yeah, absolutely. 

Kathryn:

So I love that. and what I would really like to do to finish up our interview is to do a little lightning round.

Kris:

Sure, yeah. I love rapid fire.

Kathryn:

And so I’m adjusting this first question based on what we’ve already talked about. Backstroke or breaststroke?

Kris:

Breaststroke all the way. Yeah. 

Kathryn:

Ice cream or cookies?

Kris:

Ice cream. 

Kathryn:

What flavor? 

Kris:

Well, my favorite flavor for the last 10 or so years has been vanilla caramel fudge by Ben and Jerry’s, but the Tillamook Maltin Moo Shake is really, really good.

Kathryn:

So good. It is so good. Fall or spring? 

Kris:

Spring.

Kathryn:

Gosling or Reynolds.

Kris:

Oh my God. It’s the Ryan question. I would say Gosling because I think he’s a more talented actor than Ryan Reynolds.

Kathryn:

 Wonder Woman or Bionic Woman. 

Kris:

Oh my God. Wow. Oh, my God. That’s hard. Cause I really did believe that everything in the Bionic Woman and $6 Million Man like that, to me, that was real.

Like these aren’t just actors playing apart. You know, I’m going to go with Bionic Woman simply because I know how well that’s dating me to talk about it. Jamie Summers, all the way.

Kathryn:

Potatoes or rice?

Kris:

Potatoes.

Kathryn:

Now this one, I kind of probably know the answer to, but romcom or thriller?

Kris:

Thriller. Every day and twice on Sundays. 

Kathryn:

I ruined that one earlier accidentally.

It’s okay. But I’ve enjoyed having you so much today. First of all, where can we find out more about you?

Kris:

My website is pretty simple. It’s KrisMcPeak.com and it’s Kris with a K and then on Instagram, it’s @krismaspeak. Cause if you say Kris McPeak really fast, that’s what comes out. That’s me on the gram.

Kathryn:

And your elevate your 8 podcast.

Kris:

Comes out on Wednesdays.

Kathryn:

And so one question I like to finish up every interview is what is one imperfect action you suggest we all take today to get a little bit closer to our best lives. 

Kris:

Start before you’re ready. That was something that Allison said to me and it made a huge difference.You want to start a podcast? Just go with it. You’re going to learn the editing as you go. You’re going to find your style as you go. And if you wait for it to be the perfect show, you’ll just be disappointed. Cause there’s no such thing.

Kathryn:

Absolutely. I love that answer. I second that notion. if there is something that you really want to do, just dive in and get started, that’s the best way to learn. We can overthink it all day long and it’s not going to go exactly how you think it’s going to go anywhere. Jump in. Do it. And learn from it.

Kris:

Absolutely. 

Kathryn:

I’ve had so much fun having you on the show today. Thank you so much. 

Kris:

Oh, thank you for inviting me. This has been fantastic. 

All right. And for the rest of you, thank you so much for being here today and I will see right back here next week. Go out and take daily imperfect action.