How Chip and Joanna Gaines Lean on Each Other’s Strengths During Moments of Weakness
They're currently prepping for the launch of their very own Magnolia Network, but success didn't come overnight for Chip and Joanna Gaines. When times were tough, Joanna admits she thought about giving up. The motto "Gaines never quit" helped propel the power couple forward.
“I remember moments where Chip and I would look at each other, and just think: ‘How are we going to make it?’ Not seeing the end. Not understanding you could actually get through it,” Joanna recently recalled. “We would look at each other and say, 'Do we just bail? And get out of dodge?' That seemed so much easier than having to actually figure out how do we make it through this.”
The comments came during a recent chat with Salesforce titled "Stories of Resilience."
“Chip and his family have always had this thing that 'Gaines never quit,'" Joanna continued. "And so, he’d say: ‘Jo, we’re not going to quit. We’re going to make it through this.'"
“We leaned on each other’s strengths in those moments of weakness, where I would typically only see the glass [half-empty] and Chip would see the glass half-full,” she continued. “That kind of thinking really helped me go, ‘OK, I can do this.’”
Chip has always been a dreamer, and Jo has previously credited him with helping her realize her untapped potential as early as their first date. Despite some initial red flags, Jo knew that Chip's dreams were "anything but ordinary."
"He was all over the place, talking about the businesses he'd started, and these ideas he had, and how he was buying up little houses and flipping them, and I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy," Jo wrote earlier this year. "In my mind, I somewhat instinctively checked his penchant for risk and chatty nature as two reasons we probably wouldn't go on a second date."
"All the ideas and dreams he held for himself were anything but ordinary, and he talked about the world around him through the lens of untapped potential," she continued. "When Chip did eventually stop talking, if only to take a breath, I found myself wanting to fill the silence with plans and dreams of my own. Ideas that I kept close and half-baked for fear that I didn't have what it would take to turn them into realities. Dreams that I knew required the heart of a risk taker, a quality I'd long considered to be one I simply didn't possess. Somehow those aspirations felt real, achievable even, in Chip's company."
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