4 Strategies for Cultivating Presence at Home

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I'm your host, Andy Maurer, and in this podcast I share my insights as a leadership coach and former therapist. I sit down with some of the highest level leaders in business, entertainment and human performance to help you pursue wholeness in your work life and relationships. Thanks for joining me. Let's jump in.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Pursue Whole podcast. At Pursue Whole, we believe that leaders have the power to change the world. But it's whole leaders who are going to change that world for the better. As a leader, you can't help but shape the world around you. That includes your children, your family, and your workplace. The question is, are you changing that world for the better or are you bringing your chaos and dysfunction and taking life from the world around you? Today we're talking about how to be fully present at home, and I'm going to reflect on a couple strategies that have been extremely helpful for me as I think about how I cultivate presence in my own home. Being present is extremely important because it allows us to live life rather than observe it from a distance. One of the biggest regrets I hear from leaders, and often in my own life, is that they spend too much time in the future thinking about what is the next thing that they're going to approach, and they forget about enjoying their kids and family that are right in front of them. Oftentimes this grief happens when the kids are grown and out of the house and they feel that that time went so fast and they wish they could get it back and be more present when their kids were younger, and they wish that they could have known their kids. When we're stressed and anxious about the future or discouraged about the past, we often bring that home to our families, our spouses, and our children. And we often express anger or agitation or distraction. And that's not typically who leaders want to be. No leader wakes up in the morning and thinks, you know what? I really want to be that distracted father or mother. I really want to be that angry, agitated father or mother or partner. No, they think I want to pour into my kids. I want to be fully present at home. But they struggle to know how. The leaders that I've seen who have the most peace and rest in their life are those leaders who have cultivated the ability to be present in the present, to be in the here and now, to see and notice what is happening in the moment, rather than being anxious about the future or ashamed or discouraged about the past. I define being fully present as not fearing what is inside of myself. And it's really easy as Leaders. When we feel emotions or things going on inside of us that are uncomfortable or that we don't know, we avoid what we don't know. So we push it down or we avoid it. But very difficult to be present if we have fear or anxiety or discouragement looming inside of ourself. Being present at home is something that I've worked really hard to cultivate in my own life, and I'm not perfect at it, but I am trying to pursue healthier ways of how to accomplish this at home. I'm going to give you four really practical and tactical things that you can do and that I've actually done in my own life to cultivate being fully present at home. The first is hire an executive assistant. At first, it was really difficult for me to say I need help and to let someone care for me and support me. And as I said, sat down with my executive assistant, who's been with me a couple weeks now. I had to sit down and I had to express, hey, I really need another supportive person in my life. I definitely lean more towards control in my life as a way to stay safe. And giving up that control is something that's been difficult for me over the last couple years. But one of my mottos this year has been delegate more than I'm comfortable with so that I can prioritize what's most important in my life. And because that's been my motto, I knew I needed to hire an executive assistant to help me offload what's not important in my life. Scheduling emails, booking appointments, and mental clutter is not what's important to me. It distracts me from what's most important. My executive assistant has helped me in a couple different ways. One, they helped me prioritize my ideal evening. That's something that we're currently working on. And basically, I've spent my entire life building out my calendar for what I'm supposed to do during the workday. And then when I look at my calendar for the evening, I have no clarity around what am I doing with my kids, what kinds of routines do I want to create, and how do I want to spend my evenings. I just let them happen oftentimes. And my executive assistant has been working with me to think through and plan what do I want my ideal evenings to look like, my intentional decisions with my children, with my family, and my time at home. The other thing that has been really helpful with an EA is that I don't have to check my email because she wakes up and she checks it before I even get out of bed. It was difficult for me to offload my email at first because I got this rush of excitement, this dopamine rush, this addiction to always receiving stimulation through email. I felt like it made me important. I felt like I was succeeding when I got email, when I responded to email. But now I put my email app actually on a different page of my phone, so I don't even see it pop up with how many unread messages I have. And I really only check my email maybe three or four times a day at max, because I know that my EA is there filtering those messages as they come through and only keeping the ones that are most important for me to respond to. I think the biggest thing that's helped is when I get home because I've delegated and offloaded so much of what's in my head. I don't have to have all that mental clutter when I go to connect with my kids or sit down with them. And this allows me to shut work off when I come home and be fully present. In addition to hiring an ea, the second most helpful thing to keep me present at home has been to prepare for the home transitions. There are a couple ways that I prepare for my transitions at home. As soon as I turn in my street, I start thinking about transitioning into who I want to be at home. And we'll often take a couple deep breaths as I think about setting the right intentions. I have a couple words that I think about when I pull into the garage. I think about connection, calm, peace, and love. And I try to channel those words in my body language, in my tone, and how I want to show up as I walk through that door. I also have three boys, all under the age of nine. So I prepare myself for the unexpected. When I walk through the door, it's probably going to be loud, chaotic, messy, and everybody's going to be rambunctious, and that's okay. But I need to prepare myself as I walk into the room. This helps me not get caught off guard if the chaos is too high or the intensity is too loud. The second thing that I do is I leave my workout bag and my work stuff in the car. I don't actually bring it into the house until later, after the kids go to bed. And when I walk through the door, I greet every single person in my family with a smile, with eye contact, and with a kiss. Even if the kids are watching a show, I'll go up to them and I'll say, hey, look at Daddy real quick. And I'LL smile at them and I'll give them a kiss and I ask them how their day is. Just know this. How you start your interactions with your family when you come home is how your entire night is going to progress. So start them on a good foot. I try to make these transitions as relational as possible because if I come in with work mode, my stress and my anxiety, I'm going to start working when I'm at home. It's going to be like my high performance environment. I'm going to start cleaning things, pushing my kids to do their homework right away. I'm going to be rigid and controlling in my approach. I've seen this happen to me over and over again. So I try to think this transition has to be relational. The last thing I do when I'm home and I walk through that door is after I've greeted everyone, I'll go in my room and I'll change out of my work clothes and either get into joggers, Lululemon shorts or a comfy T shirt. And all this does is it allows my body to recognize that shift and move into a state of comfort and relaxation. The times when I leave my dress clothes on and my dress shoes for the first hour, I can tell I'm a completely different person. It's like I'm still in that work mod, but when I change out of my clothes and I put on my joggers or my comfy T shirt, it just changes my Persona, it changes my personality, and I'm able to just chill a little bit more. So hire an ea. Prepare for your transitions at home. And the third thing is you gotta just let things slide. Don't treat your home like your high performance workplace. You gotta refrain from perfecting and optimizing your home like you do your workplace. Our home should have a very different energy and feel and nature to them than our offices or workplaces. When you see something that's out of order or messy, ask yourself this simple question. Is this of such high importance that I have to fix this right now or can it wait? This gives you the freedom to let things go a bit and really focus on having more fun or play at home. Your family is not your high performance playground. They are relational, emotional, and they need more play and more connection from their mother or their father. The last behavior that I've tried to cultivate in my life in order to be fully present at home is to give yourself a timeout. When you feel distracted by anxiety or when you feel flooded with frustration or anger, take a Time out. What this looks like is when I'm so overwhelmed or I'm uptight or I'm angry and I'm controlling, my wife will often look at me and say, you need to go have a timeout or you need to go in a separate room. When your spouse says that, don't fight them, just go do it. Trust them. When they say, your energy is too much right now, can you get some space and then come back in a different mode? That's been really helpful for me and my spouse to have open dialogue about that. So I'll actually go in a different room room. I'll take a couple breaths, I'll recognize that I feel defensive or I feel frustrated or angry and I'll take a couple breaths and I'll just let my body calm down and blow off steam before I enter back in with my family. Now, every single one of us isn't going to do that well, and we are going to blow up. If you do blow up, just repair those fractures, go to your kids or your spouse and say, I'm sorry, you didn't deserve that. I'm having a hard day. Please forgive me. And lastly, if you're having a hard day, you don't have to pretend like you're not. I found that one of the most helpful things is for me to come home and if I'm distracted or if I'm sad or I'm angry, to sit down with my kids and actually tell them, hey, Daddy's having a really hard day, or Daddy's feeling really sad today. And what that does is it gives children context because children are very self absorbed in a very natural developmental way. So when you're angry or when you're sad or when you're blowing up, children take that as a personal fault on them. So when I give my children context and I say, hey, Daddy's really sad today, I had some hard things happen, or daddy's feeling really angry. I just need some space. It lets them know, okay, this is about dad. This isn't about me. One of the most connecting times I have with my kids is oftentimes when I come to them and say, hey, I'm having a really hard day. What daddy could use right now is a big hug. And they'll wrap their arms around me and they'll give me a hug and I'll say, oh, that feels so good right now. Thank you so much for that hug. This is a point of connection and you don't have to pretend like you're okay and you're strong and you're macho. Let your family see your vulnerability. Let them know you have needs. Let them know you're sad and ask for what you need or ask for a hug. If you don't remember anything from this podcast, remember these two things. To be fully present, you must not fear what is inside of yourself. What is it that you push down or afraid of to face inside of yourself? Is it a thought? Is it a feeling? Is it something you did? You got to find that and you got to face that. The second thing I want you to remember is that you don't always have to be strong and put together for your family. Allow them in and let them see your vulnerability. Tell them it's too much. Tell them you had a hard day. And I think you'll be surprised at how that'll lead to even deeper connection with your wife or your spouse or your husband or your children. So it gave you a lot of ideas on different things that you can do and apply to be fully present at home. But let me summarize this into two that you can take action on today. When you pull into your driveway today, I want you to set an intention of who you want to be when you walk through that door. How do you want to show up as a father or a mother or a partner? Channel that energy as you walk through that door. The second thing is that when you walk through that door, greet everyone in your family with either a hug or eye contact or a kiss. Let them know you see them before you move on to the next thing. If you just did those two basic things, it would shape your ability to be fully present home in very powerful ways. If being present is difficult for you, there's probably something on the inside that you fear, something that you're running from or trying to keep distracted from. But you gotta face it. We built Pursue Whole to help support you in that journey, to face what you fear and to give you courage to enter into what is stirring on the inside. Feel free to reach out to me or one of our coaches and we would be happy to help walk through that journey with you and help you learn how to transform your fear into peace so that you can be fully present at home. You can learn more about what we do and who our coaches are@guose whole.com and remember that whole leaders will change the world for the better. Thanks everybody.

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