
The need to design for wholeness.
When I began my new life as a freelancer, suddenly with oodles of free time on my hands and fewer stresses, I began to turn my gaze to my home life and found much that needed to be improved. In so doing, I discovered a very useful way of looking at my life.
I thought I was doing a good job balancing a full time job as a CEO and being a good dad and partner to my wife. However, after only two weeks at home, I realised how much my wife had been compensating and how much we were really just scraping by.
I would talk to myself about how pressures at home and at work were getting too much. But I never considered that my work stress was affecting my kids. How could it be? Surely I was doing a good job of disconnecting from work once I got home?
I thought that by having a no device policy at home when with the kids, and by avoiding late calls at home I was creating that separation. But it was only once I stopped working that I realised how much extra bandwidth was available to focus on my kids. It wasn’t about the visual cues, it was about me — I wasn’t switching off — not really, not completely. Being truly 100% present for them was happening so rarely before that I didn’t even know what it felt like.
It wasn’t about the visual cues, it was about me — I wasn’t switching off — not really, not completely.
Once I stopped working full time, I realised how the thing I was spending the majority of my brain power, emotional energy and time focused on was affecting everything around me: my kids’ and my wife’s wellbeing and happiness. Since that time — and it’s easy to strike this down to confirmation bias — my kids’ grades have improved, home life is more fun and less stressful, and everything seems to have become a lot better at home. To check this, I actually asked my kids, and my wife, and they confirmed it. They much prefer me now I’m not so preoccupied mentally with work.
“You were quite shouty before, which made me sad, and you’d come home quite grumpy. It’s much better now, we didn’t used to see you except at the weekends.”
Archie (10)
It’s easy to attribute this change to just having more time at home, or being less stressed, but I think there’s something more powerful at work here. As soon as I started to see the change in those around me, I realised how naive I had been in thinking I was an isolated part of my family and my problems could be separated from theirs. As a family unit, you could think of us as a system. In systems theory, the stresses and strains on a part directly affect the health of the whole.
When I began to see how my actions were not in a vacuum, the realisation really changed how I acted at home, with friends, and at work.
This experience raised key questions for me. In what ways do you find your mood or actions affect those around you, either at work or at home? What systems are you part of? How can you become mindful of the small or large ripples that we cast around us each day?
