Meet My Wife - Renée Warren

About this video

Dan interviews his wife Renée Warren about their marriage, parenting and entrepreneurial life. They recount meeting via Twitter when she, then living in Toronto and running a small-business blog interviewing entrepreneurs, asked to pick his brain while he was in San Francisco; they met at Toronto’s MaRS Centre, where she describes watching him come down a long escalator backlit by a skylight, and initially blowing him off. They now have two boys, Max and Noah, born 11 months apart. Renée calls living with Dan ’living with chaos’: he is a constant experimenter — deciding to do a triathlon before knowing how to swim, or starting 14-18 hour fasts — and their life got faster, not slower, after kids, illustrated by a month of near-nonstop summer travel coast to coast in Canada and into Maine. Their counterweight is applying business systems to family life: a family mission and five core values summed up as GCASH — growth, community, adventure, spirituality and health — weekly Friday meetings (11:30, before CrossFit) with an agenda where they rate each other as spouses, quarterly couples retreats, annual planning, a roughly 45-minute argument rule that sends longer fights to a therapist, and Renée’s FamilyAcademy.co resources for female entrepreneurs. On unsupportive or out-of-sync partners, she uses Philip McKernan’s mountain metaphor: stop trying to drag a partner up, let them find their own purpose, start with one small shared ritual, and be a lighthouse rather than a tugboat. She also discusses mother guilt, ‘un-conditioning’ expectations about housework, carving out non-negotiables such as CrossFit five days a week and Thursday drum lessons, and her conviction that parents working on themselves — fixing the environment, not the flower — matters more than fixing the child.

Key takeaways

• Run family life with business-like systems: shared core values (theirs are growth, community, adventure, spirituality, health), weekly meetings with an agenda, and quarterly retreats
• Communicate workload seasons explicitly and time-box them; a partner told ‘crush it for three years, don’t expect me home’ signals a broken business, not a necessary sacrifice
• Do not drag an out-of-sync partner up the mountain; let them find their own purpose, encourage rather than pressure, and start with one small shared ritual
• Treat therapy like coaching — an unbiased outside view of communication — rather than as a sign of failure, including a rule to escalate fights that run too long
• Parenting improves most when parents work on themselves and the environment; for guilt, un-condition inherited expectations and protect personal non-negotiables like exercise

Episode details: published November 7, 2019 · 52:58 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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