MM186

How do you protect yourself from all the pressures of modern day living?

Our window cleaner was talking the other day about how he struggles with some aspects of family life. His two children (boys 7 & 9) constantly argue and he finds himself becoming angry and shouts at them quite a bit. 

After a full day going up and down ladders he finds his tolerance levels have plummeted by the time he gets home.

I can imagine from my experience, of knowing him for many years, he is full of beans all day when he is dealing with his customers. He is always laughing and joking, smiling and having great conversations with everyone he meets. 

So, by the time he gets home, he is all ‘smiled out’.

I really understand how that can happen, and, to some extent, I feel like that at times myself after a few days of delivering training for groups of people. The clients and customers get to see the best of you but the family might get to experience something else!

So what do you do to stop it from happening? How do you change or switch to family mode after being in work mode?

For me, my first strategy is to use the drive home to get all my thinking done. Everything about the day, about the week ahead, stuff to catch up on and I give my self the whole journey to sort it out. By the time I get to Ringwood (7 miles from home) I change and start to think of how I need to be when I get home. Who will be there, what will they want to talk about or even do.  I might even get in and then be asked to, immediately, take someone to football training or work. I do this without moaning, even though all I want to do is sit down and chill out.

That 7 miles is driven in silence with no radio or anything to distract me. I concentrate on my breathing and become aware of the tensions in my muscles, so I can relax and prepare for home.  It is a process that I find helps me to be in a better frame of mind when I get in.

I haven’t always had this process and, sometimes, I do get distracted during that 7 miles, with phone calls or sometimes I have something on my mind that I can’t let go of.

I’m not perfect, by any means.

So, my second strategy, when getting home, is to jump in the shower as soon as possible, wash the day away and change into something comfortable – which really helps me get out of work mode…

I use the work to home example as I think we all go through something like that but it could be home to work instead. How do you get out of ‘weekend mode’ or ‘holiday mode’ and back to a high performing individual?

Athletes and sports people have to do this every time they go on the pitch to play, pool to swim or track to run. They have to get their heads in the right space. They can’t turn up for an event and postpone it, because they don’t feel like it today!

Tony Robbins has some great video clips on YouTube and also has written some very powerful books that have changed people’s lives. Positive pre-play, visualisation, goal setting or meditation are great ways to focus the mind and get you prepared for any eventuality.

What do you do to get into the right frame of mind for work, home, sport or even sleep? For the next month I am going to do a 20 minute yoga session every day – I’ll let you know how it goes.

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