Andrea:
Today we’re going to talk about creating healthy boundaries, because one of the things that everybody will discover, I’m sure you probably discovered it already is, you can pretend to have good boundaries when you are going out to work because the physical location of being away, being at work and then coming home helps to create those healthy boundaries. But when everything happens under one roof, you have to be very deliberate.
Jon:
Deliberate is the word, absolutely…
Andrea:
Yeah… very deliberate and very intentional about identifying the boundaries that are important, and then creating healthy boundaries. And we want to talk about that in two ways. One is the boundaries that you want to agree with those family members around you, when you’re working, when you’re not working, we’ll come back to that in a second. And the other one is about boundaries in terms of values, things that are important to you and how you will turn up when those values… We’ll explain that in a little bit more. So that one is more value-based.
Jon:
But it is so important to do this because one of the big problems I guess we found in the past is that, we used to make assumptions. You assume that what’s going through your head, is going through other people’s heads. And whatever you’ve mapped out, somehow they’re going to automatically know what’s going on in your mind. So you’ve got to have a conversation with the people around you, to clarify some of the assumptions that you’re making, clarify the assumptions that they’re making and get on the same page, and then agree a schedule around that.
Andrea:
So one of the easy ways to, in terms of creating healthy boundaries around work and life at home, is to discuss with your partner or family members, people around you, what your preferred schedule to the day could look like and negotiate between them, so it works for everybody. So if you had a spouse, or have a spouse, or partner that they need to work, you need to work and children need to be looked after, who will be on which shift? Who will be working when? And who will cover for whom? Depending on the age of the children, if they’re self-contained and they can have stuff that they’re getting on with, maybe you can both work at the same time.
Andrea:
But it’s as important to talk about who will work when, as it is to say, when you will both stop, when you will be available as a family? If mealtimes are important to you, for example, when is the main meal time that you’ll all be available for? So that you schedule your meetings and calls around that, if you want to be available for other things for each other during the day, one-on-one time with each other, a family event because in the days and weeks ahead, where we’re all going to be together, including time to spend together and gel together as a family. And keep everybody’s spirits up is as important as being, head down working. We can’t pretend that doesn’t exist.
Jon:
Yeah, exactly. And on the two points, even stepping back for a second to talk about on the Work front, especially now that everybody’s home and everybody’s trying to get stuff done from home, whether it’s work or play, there’s probably only so much bandwidth that you have coming through your-
Andrea:
Your internet.
Jon:
Your cables, your internet coming into the house. We’ve had to agree with the boys when we need to be on calls like this. And perhaps they can do their, if they’re going to be doing their homework, if that’s one thing or they going to be on Minecraft, or streaming games, or on Netflix, or whatever it is, if maybe they can do that at a different time. Everybody’s upfront with ‘what do you have on?’. Again, don’t make assumptions. What do you have on? Because I guess even for the boys, one of the most frustrating things is, maybe Isaac plays a lot of Minecraft with his friends and he gets on calls.
Jon:
And I guess the most frustrating thing for him is, he gets going, and he’s all connected with all these different friends, and they’re all in the middle of their game. And we say, sorry, can you come off now, because we need to do this. If only we’d taken the time to schedule it and let them know, which we have done thankfully, but if you don’t, you can see the frustration that builds when he’s just into his flow and all of a sudden you’re saying, can you come off that now, please? We need to do this.
Andrea:
Everybody’s grating against everybody. And sometimes… Go on.
Jon:
Oh, separately I was going to say, the other assumption is around, even though we’ve had the Easter weekend, I had… My ideal was to spend some family time sitting, watching some, the traditional Easter movies. I guess it reminded me of my childhood and so on. We did that a little bit, but then, Sam would chime in that, his view was we’d actually sit down and play monopoly together. So we all had different expectations. And unless you have that conversation and agree on what you’re going to be doing when, you’re going to have frustrations, you’re going to have people with different expectations being frustrated.
Andrea:
And that’s the point, because especially with the work from home edict, that’s come from on high, the assumption can be that you’re just going to replicate what you do in the office at home and work the normal work hours, office hours, because now you’re home – but that doesn’t mean your present. But that’s not going to work, not in a lockdown situation. And we’ve been there, we’ve tried that. So really talk about the core hours that you need to work and be as intentional about when you are available for the family and when your available for each other, as you will be disciplined about work.
Andrea:
I know there’s a lot of tension around finances around showing that you’re still delivering, and worthy of the job, and all these different emotions mixed up in there, but it can’t simply be replicating what you used to do in the office at home, because they’re real people and real lives, to support people through if you’re going to survive it for the long haul. And that brings us neatly onto the second point. There are a couple of stories we wanted to share to bring this point alive, because when you think about values and things that are really important to you, sometimes the people who are the most important to us are the ones that we happily put on hold… happily?… Well, we put them on hold and try to shut that part of our personal lives, out of our professional lives. And I don’t know where this…
Jon:
Or even in the moment, we certainly don’t give them the value… We certainly don’t communicate to them the value that actually, we really do feel about them.
Andrea:
Yeah. And it’s something that I realized a few years ago when I was running a home-based business to be home and present for the boys. And I found this grating on the inside, because I would be busy trying to get on with work. One of the boys would run in and I would say, no, not now, I’m in the middle of work. And then something would grate and say, hang on, I’m doing this so I can be home and be present for them and yet, I’m not available for them. And it can create a real – I can’t find a better word – a grating on the inside, a contradiction of values that are important to you because what I was living on the outside, wasn’t true to the values that I had on the inside, which was been very present and available for boys, who were a long time in coming.
Andrea:
And that’s where this whole idea of taking the time to think about, especially now I think that the silver lining or the gift in all this COVID-19 disaster is, a chance to really think about what are the things that we value? What are the things that we dream about doing one day? What are the things that we keep saying, if ever we had the time, this is what we would do? We have this blank sheet of paper. They were talking this morning about what… potentially another three weeks or so for lockdown until the 7th of May or something.
Andrea:
We have this blank sheet of paper every day that we’re up and healthy that says, here is a gift, here is a whole day. How do you want to live this day? And how do you want to live in general each week? And how do you want to balance the things that are important to you in that time? And I think it’s a conversation we need to have with ourselves, and then with each other, so that we can design the life balance that we want and not turn up to life after COVID and get back on this hamster wheel, this rat race, where we’re frazzled all the time and keep postponing things. And… you were going to say something?
Jon:
Yeah. What I was going to say is, its not until you’ve had those two conversations with the people around you, but as And was saying just now, perhaps even more importantly, the conversation with yourself to say actually, what is really important to me here? Until you have those conversations, you may be going on autopilot and autopilot doesn’t necessarily work the best. I mean, I think the story we love to share in this context is around, was Robert Kelly, wasn’t it? What was his role actually? Do you remember?
Andrea:
Yeah, he’s an economist I think and he was being interviewed by the BBC.
Jon:
Yeah. He’s giving this interview and you may have seen the clip, it’s one of those ones that went viral out there, because he’s giving this very serious interview on world news or whatever it happens to be and the door opens, and in comes his, one little child comes through the door screaming and dancing. And then the second one comes through the door.
Andrea:
In a stroller I think, into his home office.
Jon:
And his wife comes through the door, trying to grab the kids all on her hands and knees, hoping that nobody can see her all down there and grabbing the kids. And he’s pretending there’s nothing happening there and children out of the way, this is a professional interview we’re carrying on with here. And I don’t know if he had taken the time previously to stop and think actually in that situation, what is the best response here? What is the response that communicates value, honor, respect to my family? As well as engages with the audience and what have you. And I think the general response to that video is, he hadn’t really thought that one through as well as perhaps he could have done.
Andrea:
But I think a lot of us laugh. Laugh a guilty laugh, knowing that in that situation, we might’ve done exactly the same thing because somehow we’ve been trained that anything to do with family, or children, or personal life doesn’t belong in the professional sphere. And that’s such rubbish, but our natural inclination is, I’m busy being professional, I don’t have time to be mommy right now, I don’t have time to be caring… because he was very uncaring, literally pushing the children away and trying to pretend that they weren’t there.
Jon:
Will somebody take this problem away please? He didn’t say that, but that’s what his actions communicated very loudly.
Andrea:
And for kids, it will be very confusing. It’s like, but you’re my daddy, I thought we could play, kind of thing. And I know that I’ve been guilty of that, and I could easily go down that route, but for seeing it modeled differently. So we were at a conference of about 300-400 people in the room. And in the middle of this presenter speaking, from the back of the room probably about seven year old, a little girl walked all the way from the back, all the way up to the front and without losing a beat, the speaker bent down, scooped her up in his arms and continued presenting as if…
Jon:
Nothing happened.
Andrea:
It was most natural thing in the world, my daughter came to me, I’m her daddy, I’m going to hold her and I’m going to keep on being professional. And I thought, wow, what an amazing example of living authentically in the moment, where all his values were being honored at the same time. And we’ve shared that story to say this, while you are at home, you’ll get moments that challenge your values, you’ll get moments that challenge where your commitment really lies. Who’s really important to you. What matters most.
Andrea:
And I pray that for you and for us, we will make the right decision in the moment, make our children feel special, make our partner feel special, give people in our team the honor of saying, don’t worry about it. What’s your daughters name? What’s your son’s name? Let me meet them. I think it’s an opportunity to be more human and be more connected, and be more authentic about the things that really matter to us and work that into our schedule. if you could create the ideal week, what would you do with it? Because this is the opportunity that COVID-19 gives us.
Jon:
Absolutely, take time to create healthy boundaries, have the conversations with the people around you. Importantly though, also have the conversation with yourself about what really does matter the most and take action that demonstrates that. It’s been great, it’s been real. I’m conscious that we’re up against the clock… 15 minutes have come and gone like that. So we look forward to seeing you again on… Thursday now?
Andrea:
Thursday, at three o’clock.
Jon:
Thursday Three o’clock. For the next of the series, we’re going to be talking then about Roles and Responsibilities, aren’t we?
Andrea:
Roles and Responsibilities in your home.
Jon:
And how those play out, especially in this situation under lockdown. So thanks for being with us. Thanks again for some of the comments coming through again this morning. And look forward to seeing you on Thursday. And remember, you’re going to have to sign up again. We seem to be having problems with the emails… with the reminders… We’re going to have to get a professional to have a look at that because something seems to be going wrong there, but thanks for joining us again this morning and look forward to seeing you again on Thursday.
Andrea:
Thanks for the comment, Esi, yes it absolutely does create a mismatch of emotions. That’s, that grating on the inside. Great to have you all on the call, have a great day and… see you on Thursday.
Jon:
See you Thursday. Bye.
Andrea:
Bye.