How can you Juggle Working From Home with Your Husband and Reduce Stress?
My name is Emily Johnson (Psychologist), I am the proud Co-found of Gold Coast based training and coaching company, Get Mentally Fit.
Our mission is to proactively guide clients through the beneficial process of developing preventative, practical skills and habits that enable sustainable mental wellbeing and greater levels of life satisfaction.
We achieve this by practically and professionally delivering programs that are a proven knowledge mix of Positive Psychology, neuroscience, mindfulness and Mental Toughness.
Our catalogue of programs is specifically targeted at supporting business leaders, corporate teams and secondary-school students.
How Did We Get Started?
As an external consultant for 15 years, before co-founding Get Mentally Fit, I had the privileged responsibility of training or coaching thousands of corporate employees, the majority from ASX500 listed companies, on a complete range of leadership and mental wellbeing topics.
During this time, I clearly identified that whilst most people sit in the state of ‘knowing’, they invariably suffer from stress, overwhelm and distraction. This is due to an inability to implement and embed mental wellbeing knowledge, ideas and habits.
In response to these observations, my husband (secondary teacher) and I co-founded Get Mentally Fit in January 2020, to uncompromisingly support clients to eliminate the disconnect between ‘knowing, doing and being’.
Get Mentally Fit advocates that: to enjoy regenerative mental fitness (health), people must practice daily skills as they do to maintain their physical health.
Ultimately, our vision is to support clients to realise clarity and strength of mind, enabling them to skilfully handle life’s challenges, stressors and pressures, regardless of their circumstances, while also being able to mindfully enjoy positive experiences.
Top 5 Tips for Work at Home Mums/Moms
Can’t seem to get enough done? Easily distracted? Trouble focusing?
The following 5 tips are aimed at reducing these derailers while increasing your energy, productivity and enjoyment while working from home.
Create and Maintain a Routine
Creating a regular schedule is important as it assists us to have great control and certainty over our workdays. Certainty helps to negate any adverse experiences of change and frees us to enjoy increased levels of available energy, creative thinking and personal engagement.
This tip is especially important if you have little ones at home with you. Kids thrive on routines and boundaries. If they can predict their day, it helps to reduce anxiety, stress and behavioural problems.
Learn to Become Indistractble
Learn to identify all internal and external distractions and how to manage them. If you are hungry, thirsty or ruminating about something either eat, drink and try and resolve your problem or try implementing ‘worry time’.
Worry time is simply setting aside a specific time in your day to ‘go there‘ and think about your concerns. It is equally important that when concerns pop up outside these times that you tell yourself you’ll address these thoughts during worry time.
*Do not continue to push on while trying to ignore these internal needs as they will distract you and affect your concentration and performance.
*Turn off notifications, social media and email alerts. Ideally, attempt to reduce the noises around you or learn techniques that enable you to block out the noise.
Use Timeboxing as a Time Management Tool
Timeboxing is simply ‘boxing out periods of time’ to work on specific tasks each day.
Despite modern technological distractions, by using a schedule maker like Schedule Builder or an automated calendar to set out ‘an implementation intention’ (Nir Eyal). Simply put: plan out what and when you are going to do things.
Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable suggests: “If you don’t plan your day in advance – according to your values and schedule – someone else will plan to for you.“
Incorporate Short, Restorative Wellbeing Activities Into Your Day
This should be non-negotiable!
Identify short, restful, calming activities to punctuate your day. This could include 10 minutes in the sun, reading a magazine in a relaxing spot, a short walk in nature, a cup of tea or coffee outside, daydreaming by listening to music or a short meditation.
Carefully selected activities, that whilst rejuvenating you, will provide restorative rest and a positive distraction from your work. These activities will act to energise and reward you for your hard work throughout the day,.
Learn Ways to Psychologically Detach From Work
Without the commute to and from work, work at home mums miss the benefit of travel time to reflect and decompress.
Therefore, it is important you create a transition out of work. Try this practical hack:
Mindful Gaps (3 R’s): Reflect, Rest, Reclaibrate
At the conclusion of your day, firstly, Reflect on what went well during the day and where you could have improved. Rest for a few minutes to be able to mindfully let your thoughts dissipate.
Recalibrate by identifying a personal characteristic e.g. fun, caring, empathic, that you will need to switch roles from your work life to your home life so you show up as you need to for your family.
Marketing Advice
Like many start-ups and home-based businesses, effective cash flow management and appropriately scaled marketing have been crucial for our organic growth.
Finding economical and business appropriate marketing streams, to healthily grow Get Mentally Fit’s community has been our focus.
The following marketing strategies are currently appropriate for us and our present growth.
Earned Media and PR
This form of brand and profile marketing is ideally suited to our business as I can leverage my extensive knowledge and expertise, as a psychologist, to broaden the awareness of our services.
Publishing articles, such as this one, or editorials in online journals enables us to economically distribute small, targeted, introductory samples of the practical information that forms the content of our programs.
We personally enjoy this marketing strategy as this platform is a vehicle for us to disseminate psychoeducational to a large, engaged audience while credibly exposing our brand.
Social Media Marketing
Whilst is has been an ongoing learning and tweaking experience, that has at times been frustrating, we are incrementally experiencing social media’s peculiar benefits.
One project of note is our free A-Z to getting mentally fit program, which is currently utilising Facebook to accommodate a group of 180+ members. It is our intention to evolve this program into a subscribed program in 2022 and the content from this year’s articles are soon to form an eBook.
LinkedIn is increasingly proving to be a highly effective marketing tools for Get Mentally Fit. The ability to network with relevant professionals and share opportunity thinking is invaluable to us. These networks are progressively leading to constructive relationships and healthy business partnerships.
Products for Prospect
We are constantly mindful of opportunities that may represent a product for prospect. As in all businesses, generating an ecosystem of qualified leads and referrals is critical to the viability of the business.
One example of a product for prospect, we recently developed a scorecard which has proven effective in engaging our audience in relevant mental fitness dialogue.
Balancing Work and Family
My husband and I have a daughter names Alora, who is 11 years old. She is intellectually disabled and has the superpower of being able to intuitively connect with anyone she meets, regardless of age, gender, race or mood.
As a result of Alora’s challenges, my parenting style is very much like my coaching style. I consciously encourage her to utilise her strengths to joyfully explore what she can do, rather than worrying and getting stressed by what she cannot do.
Working from home gives us the freedom to balance time with our family.
For Scott and I, co-founding Get Mentally Fit has allowed us the luxury of dropping Alora to and picker her up from school, which we are always grateful for.
While it doesn’t always work out, we try to take time out together on a Friday to do something fun, which I highly recommend to all WAHM’s.
Where you can find Get Mentally Fit
Check out the Get Mentally Fit website and contact email via emily@getmentallyfit.com.au
Follow Get Mentally Fit on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can connect with Emily on LinkedIn too.
