The home-to-work transition

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Today on the podcast I’m sharing exactly what you need to do in the first 15 minutes of your workday to be the most productive and effective with your time. I call it a home-to-work transition. This is time you set aside to prepare your head and heart for the workday ahead so that as soon as you start, you feel focused, present and ready to hit the ground running. There are two parts in a good home-to-work transition, and I will break down each of them and give you lots of examples of exactly how to do it.

Topics in this episode:

  • Why kids struggle with tantrums and how it looks different for adults

  • Why you procrastinate or scroll social media when you first start working

  • Dealing with lingering emotions from your morning with the kids

  • A personal story of how I handled an emotional morning with my kiddos

  • 10+ writing exercises you can do to get your head and heart on board with starting the workday

  • How to bring more ease through common morning struggles like getting clothes on or eating breakfast

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Today on the podcast, I'm sharing with you exactly what you need to do in the first 15 minutes of your work day in order to set yourself up to be as productive and effective with your time as possible. I call this a home to work transition. This is the time you set aside to prepare yourself for the work ahead that day so that as soon as you start, you feel focused and present and ready to hit the ground running. 


There are two parts to a home to work transition, and I'm going to break each of them down and give you lots of examples of what you can do in the midst of this time. If you're someone that struggles to get going in the morning or if you find transitioning or leaving your kid to start work to be filled with lots of emotions and feelings, this is your podcast. Are you ready? Let's get to it. 


Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 


So a client came to me recently and said, I know that you talk a lot about the work to home transition, but what about the home to work transition? Now, just to give you a little bit of context, the work to home transition is essentially what you do during the time that you leave work and you come home and how to do that really well so that you are present with your family and you really are able to let work go from your day and let your work brain actually shut down and so forth. 


Now, I call that a work to home transition, and I teach a lot about that with my clients. I give workshops and trainings on this, and there's even a podcast episode on it, so I'll make sure to link to that. 


This is a topic that I talk about a lot, but my client was really struggling with the home to work transition because some mornings the kids are just having a lot harder time. There's more tantrums, they're more resisting getting out the door. It's a harder daycare drop off. Or maybe we are having more anxious thoughts about our day coming up or a week coming up, or a meeting we're having or something like that. And she wanted to know how to best transition from work to home. I just loved this question so much, I decided to make it a podcast. 


There really couldn't have been a better day for me to write this podcast because I did have a very difficult morning with my children, and after I dropped them off from school, I was not quite ready to start my workday. And so I have some really raw thoughts and experiences that I'm going to share with you today as we get into this.


What do I mean by transition?

The first thing I want to talk about is just the idea of transitions. A transition is when we essentially go from one thing to the next thing. And if you read anything on transitions and young children, pretty much everything and everyone would tell you that young children, even down to infants, struggle with transitions. It's the moment that almost every parent can guarantee a struggle or some kind of resistance or tears from their child. 


Transitions are everything from getting your kid in a car to out of a car, or vice versa. Going from asleep to awake, going from your house to daycare, going from playtime to eating time, going from the park into the car, going from two parents to one parent for the evening. These are all transitions that many kids struggle with. 


Our brains see transition as change.

And why is that? It's because we, as human beings, are not meant to transition. We don't like transition because our brain sees it as change. And our brains would much rather things stay constant and predictable and the same in a constant state of being. That's what our brain thrives on. 


And so anytime we transition from one thing to the other, our brain sort of flips out. And it's just a very common human experience, not just for our kids, but for adults. Now, the difference between toddlers and adults is that a toddler doesn't have the tools to deal with all of the emotions of a transition, and so it comes out as tears and resisting and yelling and thrashing about. 


We, as adults, experience the same transitional emotions that kids do. It feels uncomfortable, hard, exhausting, overwhelming, anxious to us, too. We just don't tend to outwardly show it in the form of a tantrum and crying and throwing ourselves about like our kids do. What I want to specifically highlight here, as we talk about transitions generally, is that human beings struggle with them. It's not easy to go from one thing to another. And, it always comes with a cocktail of emotions. 


There's nothing wrong with you if you struggle to get going at the beginning of your work day.

And the reason why understanding these two things is really important is that as you struggle to get into work for the day, maybe you find yourself scrolling social media for, like, 15, 20, 30 minutes at the beginning of your work day, or you have a really hard time getting started on a project and you find yourself procrastinating - there's nothing wrong with you if you struggle to get going at the beginning of your work day. This is just a moment of transition that your brain is trying to find some comfort in because it feels uncomfortable and bad. 


So all human beings, all of us, we struggle with transition. Our brain would much rather keep things the same than to change them. It's a very normal experience. I want to challenge you by saying that what makes that transition difficult, is it's an emotional one. It's the emotions that come up when we transition from one thing to another. So I want you to keep those two things in mind as we continue to talk about building a home to work transition. 


Now let me share a little bit about my morning. I have two kiddos, as you probably know. Lillian, she's eight, and my son Emerson is five. This morning, the kids played really well together in Emerson's room. I think they were using magnetiles and cars and they were creating some kind of world. 


And then they came up for breakfast and got dressed, which all sort of went normally. And then it came time for me to get dressed. That's kind of when things started to go south. My daughter was sitting on the stairs, kind of, like, waiting for me outside my door that leads up to my bedroom. And I'm not exactly sure why she was there, maybe just waiting around. 


But then my son, he was sort of moaning and whining. He'd already eaten his breakfast. He was already dressed, but he wasn't getting any attention at that moment, or probably he was starting to think about the fact that we were trying to get out the door - he struggles with that, and so he starts crawling up the stairs. And when he reaches Lilian, he starts to head butt her, and she firmly tells him to stop - which is something that we've been working on with her using really strong, direct words. 


And then she told me that she moved over, out of his way so he could keep coming up, but he just moved over and continued to head butt her. So she moved one side, he would move to the other side and head butt her. And then she started to push his head out of the way, and then she would move and he would head butt her, and then she would push his head out of the way again. 


And so it was this constant thing, but it was starting to get a little bit more intense with every little push. And so finally I was able to get to them on the stairs and stop her from hitting him. And then I picked my son up to sort of separate the two of them. And then I had some very firm words with my son that he needs to be mindful of other people's words and requests, particularly when it comes to his body, and that was when things really started to fall apart. 


He ran down the stairs into his room, and when I followed a few minutes later - I knew better than to just follow right away, so I gave him a couple of minutes. And then I followed and I opened his door and I asked if I could come in. But he'd thrown something at the door, and so I took that as a sign that he was not ready yet. And so I closed the door, and I walked away for a couple more minutes. 


Mind you, we need to be at school in, like, 20 minutes. 20 minutes school starts. In order for us to get to school on time, we need to leave in ten. So he's dressed, but he doesn't have any socks or shoes on. He doesn't have a sweatshirt or jacket on. He hasn't brushed his teeth. We haven't put together his backpack yet. So there's all sorts of things we still need to do in the next ten minutes in order to get out the door and get to school on time. 



So I come back in, and he kind of hides on his bed. And I come over to him, and I very gently pull him out from his bed, and I give him a big hug, and he's just trying to squirm and push me away and grunting. He can't oftentimes use words when he's in the middle of this kind of emotional state. And I get out this little notebook that my husband and I just recently started, which has some really specific affirmations that we are trying to speak to our son's character in the middle of these tantrums. And they're really simple things like Emerson is kind, and then we give some examples of how he's kind, or Emerson is smart, and then we give some examples of how he's smart. And it's just a little strategy that we've been trying. 


So, I pull out this little book, and I start reading it to him, and he immediately stops crying, which is great, and he goes to get a piece of paper and a pen, and he starts coloring. And then when I'm done reading the affirmations to him, I get up. He seems nice and calm at this point. And he gets up and he shows me the picture and it has his name on it. And then it has like maybe four or five little small almost like amoeba, like circles. And he says that they're coal and that he is going to get coal in his stocking and that he's stupid, and then he runs away and starts to cry. 


He runs up to my room and up the stairs, and I follow him with some socks. He tries to squeeze behind the dresser to hide from me. And I pull him out and I sit him down, and he's just resisting and yelling at me. And he's throwing himself backwards, which then, because he was throwing himself around, he ends up hitting something, with his back. And then his back hurts. And then he really starts to cry. And he cries, and he cries, and he cries. And then he comes into my lap, and I hold him and he's crying. And I tell him that I love him, and I remind him that he's a very kind boy and that he's going to be okay. 


And he tells me that he doesn't want to go to school as he's yelling and crying. And then I ask him if he wants to put on his very special bracelet. He and I have matching bracelets. And I told him that whenever he looks at his bracelet today, he could remember me. It might bring him some comfort. I'm like grasping at straws, just trying to find a way to calm him down, right. And he liked that idea, but I knew he was still crying and crying this whole time. He doesn't really stop. 


And then at this point, I think my daughter calls down from the stairs. She's down the stairs and calls up and says, can I just walk to school? Like, she's totally annoyed and ready to go. And I'm like, no. Oh, no. Just wait for us. Because I've never really let her walk to school by herself on her own, even though it's literally half a block down our street. So we come down the stairs. I put on his jacket, I put on his shoes. We grab his backpack, and he's just crying and crying. And I just decided to let go of the whole teeth brushing this morning. There was no way I was going to push that. And we get out the door, and he wants to hold my hand, and he's still crying, and he pretty much cries all the way to school. And that was our morning. 


“My brain was replaying the events of the morning..”

So on my way home, I'm just swirling with all of these thoughts and emotions from the morning, many of them about my son and how we are working on helping him control some of these emotions and giving him more tools. And my brain is sort of replaying a lot of the experiences of the morning. And I'm also thinking about my daughter, who kind of went very quiet after my son started crying uncontrollably. And it made me wonder if she felt like it was her fault. So then my thoughts started to go on and on about how important it is that we really focus our attention on helping her, equipping her with some thoughts and some tools, and reminding her that these things aren't her fault and trying to give her some equal attention. 


Because I'm sure right now she thinks that her brother gets a lot more attention, and maybe he does. I'm not really sure, but I'm sure she feels that way. And so when I walked back into my house, the very first thing I saw was this drawing that my son did of, getting coal. And those were some really harsh words that he spoke about himself, right, about being stupid. And he says it in a really harsh, mean way. I'm so stupid, it hurts. 


As a mom, it just hurts to hear my son say that. It feels so hard and raw. It feels like some things that we as adults sometimes tell ourselves, but to come from a five year old, it just feels so harsh. And so I see this picture, my heart just kind of falls. 


And now I need to make myself a quick breakfast on, hop on my computer to check my email and ultimately get to writing this podcast because it's Monday and I write my podcast on a Monday. It's the start of the work week, and so I often have a lot of anxious thoughts about how my work week is going to go. And I can feel this, like, push and pull between having all of these emotions for my morning and then all of these anxieties about the work work week and the desire to just, like, jump in and ignore everything that just happened so that I could ‘be productive’ and just jump in with my time and kind of ignore all of the feelings going on. 


Lingering emotions from the morning.

That was my morning - that was how I was feeling as I got home. And to be honest, as I reflect on it, it was a pretty good morning, right until those last 20 minutes, actually, it had been really good. Both kids had been very compliant on top of everything they needed to do. I felt mostly good about the way I had handled my son's emotions and the tools that we've been working on. But there was still, of course, all of these lingering emotions about what just took place and what happened, all of these anxieties about what the work day ahead of us was going to look like. 


“My time spent working is not going to be very effective or productive if I don't do something with all of the emotions”

But here's what I know. My time spent working is not going to be very effective or productive if I don't do something with all of the emotions, thoughts, and experiences that I just had with my kids. And that's where the home to work transition comes in. It's a really specific time or specific process that's set aside for you to work through any of those thoughts and emotions that have come up for you from the morning before you start working. 


Now, I'll be honest and say that I have some really clear things that I do to help my transition from work to home. Regardless of how good or bad my morning is, there are just things that I do that help with that transition every single day. And there are some things that I do that I kind of add to my morning that are really specific when I have a difficult morning like the one I had today. 


But what I'm 100% sure of is that if I did nothing to deal with all of my thoughts and emotions from my morning, the first 30 minutes to probably an hour of my work day would be completely unproductive and almost wasted. I want you to think about that for yourself when you are having a really awesome morning and you feel really excited about work that day. Maybe the things that you have going on, you're feeling really on top of things. When you get to work, you hit the ground running. You're feeling really efficient with your time. You feel really focused. You don't allow yourself to scroll on social media. It's a very effective use of your time 


Verses when you have a lot of stuff that just went down before you got to work and you're feeling really emotional and overwhelmed and behind at least at the beginning part of your day, like when you start, you’re probably not going to be all that effective. You're likely going to scroll your emails or on various social media. You're going to go get that second cup of coffee and wander around the office and see how people are doing, it’s like avoiding and procrastinating on getting started. 


You're going to distract yourself if you work from home. You're going to distract yourself with doing dishes or doing laundry, something other than the actual work that you need to be doing. There's a really big difference. 


I don't want you to be dependent on things going really well for you to feel confident and good and productive and effective with your time at work.

Can you see it for yourself when you really enter in and start your work day feeling clear and confident and good and emotionally at least in a neutral place versus days that you are feeling really not good and really emotional and down and coming from a really negative emotional place? I don't want you to be dependent on having a really good morning with your kids or them having to behave a certain way or to not cry when you drop them off at daycare or whatever it is. I don't want you to be dependent on things going really well for you to feel really confident and good and productive and effective with your time at work. I want you to be able to get into that right energy and cultivate that productive, effective energy on demand regardless of how your morning wet so that you could feel present and focused immediately as you start. 


And that is where the home to work transition is really key. It gives you full control over your productivity and your effectiveness no matter how your morning goes or how your kids are behaving that day. Okay, so let's dive into the work to home transition. 


A home to work transition won’t feel easy at first.

So the first thing you need to know about your home to work transition is that because you're a human being, it's probably not going to flow very easily. You're probably not going to want to sit down and do a transition. Your brain is going to put up a lot of resistance to it because there's a lot of emotions. And so regardless of if there was a triggering event this morning or not, there is importance in doing a work to home transition to just get your head and your heart in the right emotional space, in the right headspace as you start your day. 


The purpose of a home to work transition is to give you control over your effectiveness at work.

The second thing I want you to know about the home to work transition is that it’s purpose is to give you control over your effectiveness at work from the moment you start in the work to home transition. I talk about some very specific practices and exercises that you can do between work and home to really help you let go of your work day and enter into your family life being really present. But the home to work transition, that doesn't feel as clear meaning there's a lot of different ways that you can do it. I don't think there's a perfect way to do this, but I can tell you that the transition should have two parts. 


I'm going to kind of condense each of these parts and give you some ideas for each of them. 


Process your emotions.

The first part is that you need to be processing your emotions and getting yourself into a more intentional mental state. But the transition should have two parts. The first is processing the emotions, and the second is getting yourself into a more intentional, positive mental state. So let's talk about the first part dealing with your emotions. 


Today I had a lot of emotions. I was feeling really discouraged about my son. I was feeling really sad for him. I was feeling really uncertain about how to handle things with my daughter. I was feeling a little bit inadequate as a mom and incapable of knowing how to help them. And when it comes to processing emotions, the key is to getting it all out. 


How to release your emotions.

Getting it out could look like sitting down with a paper and a pen and just writing about what you feel. It could look like messaging a friend and telling them everything that happened. It could look like writing a letter to yourself or to someone else. It could look like talking to yourself out loud about what happened. It could look like writing out a conversation between yourself and someone else. 


Essentially, it's just you narrating what happened and how you feel about it, purging those thoughts. And all of these suggestions I just rattled off to you, you might do them based on a particular situation. I go in and out of doing these practices based on how things went and what I feel like I really need. 


This morning, I did a couple of them. The first one I did as soon as I got home is I wrote a letter to my daughter because that was the one that was, like, really on my heart. I really wanted her to feel like it wasn't her fault. And we have this journal that I call a ‘feelings journal’. I have only just introduced it so we haven't done it a whole lot, but it's a way to basically communicate feelings because she can have a really hard time expressing what she's feeling, but sometimes she's able to write it. 


So I bought this very specific journal just between she and I where we could talk about our feelings. So I got out the journal and I wrote her a letter. And I was just expressing how frustrated I would expect that she would be feeling with her brother and how I understand what she might be feeling, and just that I love her. And it was sort of all the things I wish I could say to her right there in that moment, if we could have had a conversation and she didn't have to go to school or sometimes I write things thinking, I know you're only eight, but these are the things that are in my head. If I was talking to an adult, this is the way I would say it or talk about it. And writing it sometimes gives me some perspective to kind of say it on a more basic level or a more intentional level for an eight year old. So, I wrote her this letter. Of all the things that I wanted to tell her, that was one thing I did. It was the first thing. 


And then after that, I jumped on Marco Polo, which is a video app, if you don't know what that is, where you basically can have video conversation with somebody back and forth, right? And so I Marco Polo with my husband. Not on a regular basis, but when we're talking to each other during our work day, it's oftentimes the way we communicate. And I just shared with him everything that happened this morning, retold the story of the things that happened and how I was feeling, and I showed him the picture that my son had drawn and how I was feeling about that. I just sort of purged all of the emotions and the experiences of that morning. 


Writing as a tool to purge out emotions.

I recently did a podcast on a thought download as a tool. It's a really common tool that I will use in the morning when I'm having a really difficult morning. I just bullet point out this list of all of the things that I'm thinking and feeling as a way of getting it out of purging. If you go back and listen to that podcast, that was really what the thought download was all about. It was getting it out of your head and your heart and getting it out into the world. Because if it stays locked inside of you, it's really hard to deal with. But when you can give it to shed some light on it, when you can get it outside of you, then you have an ability to do something with it. It becomes a mechanism for you to actually deal with all those things that you're thinking and feeling. 


So that's really what we're doing here, no matter how you get it out, it's taking some time to get it all out. And all of these tools are just a way of clearing your brain. Your brain is going to hold on to these things regardless of if you intentionally give them space or not. And I want you to be in control of how these thoughts and feelings surface. And you can only do that when you have an intentional practice of purging of your thoughts if you have a mechanism of getting them out of your head. 


Because if you don't do an exercise like this, you're still going to hold on to these experiences in your head and your heart. You're going to just hop onto your computer, and you're going to start checking emails and messages or scrolling social media, and you're going to be thinking about and feeling all of these emotions from your morning. You're going to just be doing it simultaneously, which means you're not going to really be present while you're checking your email or doing whatever tasks that you choose to do first thing in the morning or while you sit in on that meeting. You're going to be in the meeting while thinking about everything that happened in your morning, right? It's not a very effective use of your time. 


So your brain is going to process all of these experiences and emotions on some level, regardless of if you give them some space and intentional space or not. But when you give it some intentionality, then it will happen a lot faster and it will happen more in your control. 


Deep breathing and affirmations.

Oftentimes after I purge a lot of my emotions in whatever format I do, what I'll do next is I will just take some really deep breaths and I'll put my hand over my heart, and I will remind myself that I am loved and cared for and okay. And that's not something I've always done, maybe over the last year or so. It's something that I've made a more regular practice because it feels sort of like somebody has given me a really big hug, right? 


If I were to sit down with a friend and purge my morning and tell her everything that happened to me this morning and just tell her the whole story, likely it would probably end with maybe a few tears and probably a hug from her or like a hand on my shoulder or something like that. Something that shows that she understands, she empathizes, she loves me. And so when I can kind of create that experience for myself by putting my hand over my heart and closing my eyes and breathing really deeply and just reminding myself of how loved I am - that's the first thing, processing your emotions, once you do that, then you're ready to move into a more intentional space. 


And I've gone in and out of, like, several different ways, several different intentional practices in my mornings doing this. But over the last few months, the practice that I have been doing is something I teach a lot of my clients to do. It's a kind of, cultivating new mindset or intentional mindset kind of practice. 


The Daily Work.

I call it The Daily Work, and it's simply five questions that focus on cultivating a single intentional thought about yourself. I have a very specific notebook that I write this in every single work day. Some days my brain feels really unfocused and it takes me like 20 minutes to answer these questions, but other days it takes me five. And that's the goal. The goal is focus. But it's not just focus on what you plan to do that day, like your tasks and your goals for the day. It's to focus on who you want to be that day. 


When you're feeling really amazing and confident about yourself as a human being, you will be more productive and effective with your time.

Because when you're feeling really amazing and confident and good about yourself as a human being, you will be more productive and effective with your time. That is the goal - to make you productive and effective during the day, so your tasks come more easily or naturally to you. And that happens when you're in a really good headspace about yourself. 


So for me, this is a time to really focus on who I am as a human being and getting myself into a really positive headspace about that. Currently, I'm doing this five question daily practice - I'm not going to go into that, but it's really about cultivating a single thought about myself every single day. 


Gratitude lists.

Some past practices that I've used is, gratitude lists because that usually leaves me feeling really satisfied and like I'm enough and my life is enough and life is good. That puts me as a human being into a different kind of energy. 


I Am lists.

When I'm feeling really satisfied, I do something I call I Am Lists. That's where I basically just bullet point out every sentence, starting with I am, and then I fill it in with something positive, right? 


  • I am smart. 

  • I am capable. 

  • I am a great mom. 

  • I can do hard things. 

  • I'm devoted.

  • I'm loved. 

  • I try hard. 


Again, the focus is more on who than what. 


Intentional journal prompts.

You can do an intentional journal prompt where every day you answer the same question like, how do I know I'm really good at my job? Or maybe another one if you're struggling more as a mom might be, how do I know I'm a really great mom? Or it could be like, how do I know I'm really deserving of my role or my position? 


You just pick a question that your brain sort of fights a little bit, and then you spend days or weeks or months answering that same question every single day. Again, it's about getting your brain, your mindset into a very intentional space that's going to help you hit the ground running as soon as you start working. 


So processing your emotions and creating intentional positive thoughts about yourself, both of those things are essential in a home to work transition. Now, there are some things that can make this transition a lot easier, and I want to talk about them. Okay? 


How to troubleshoot your morning routine.

The first is troubleshooting common problem moments in your morning. I remember talking to my client Kathy about this on my podcast. I'll link to her interview. It was a little while ago, but you might really want to go back and listen to it, because I remember she was describing a lot about her morning routines and some of her struggles with her morning routines. And it was a great interview, but every single morning, I remember she was struggling with getting her kids shoes on. They were constantly running away, or they were, like, constantly doing things that they weren't supposed to be doing other than putting their shoes on, or they were throwing themselves on the floor or whatnot. 


For my kids, sometimes it's avoiding eating breakfast. Or for me, for a while, it was like feeling like I didn't have enough time to get myself dressed and ready in the morning. These are just like some common spots in your morning, where conflict tends to happen. And this is an opportunity for you to actually spend some time to troubleshoot or problem solve for that moment so it becomes less difficult. 


And I know that seems really simple, and yet it's the most amazing thing to me that if you're struggling with the same thing every single day, it's a good sign that something needs to change. But it amazes me that we as moms don’t really think that way. I don't think that way all the time. If we're constantly struggling to get our kid's shoe on, the most common thought is, well, he's a toddler. He's going to struggle with this, or, this is just the way it's going to be, or, this is just really hard. Like, we just kind of seem to settle for these problem moments rather than thinking, huh, I wonder what I could do to make this go a bit smoother. 


Now, of course, I don't have all the answers for you on how to problem solve for you and your child and your routines. But if you have a mindset that this could be easier or this could even be fixed, I wonder how you would go about experimenting with it so that you can actually mitigate some of the conflict and trouble emotional moments that happen in your day, so that those don't linger with you as you enter into your work day. 


Now, I remember for my client, Kathy, in this interview, we talked about how one of the problem moments for her was the shoes. One of the things she realized was that her littlest would always try to put on the wrong pair of shoes. Like, that was a common problem. That always was, like, delaying them. She was constantly going for the sandals when it was a rainy day or her rain boots when it was a hot day. And it occurred to her that she could just remove all of the other shoes except for the ones that she wanted her to wear that day. That would actually just make the whole situation easier. She troubleshooted it by going, oh, I could just put all of her other shoes away in a closet and then there would be no fight over this anymore. 


Troubleshooting my morning routine with my kids.

For me, my son has always struggled to get dressed. And it used to be that I would give them breakfast and then they would get dressed and then do their teeth and everything like that. Well, I started saying to them, I want you to get dressed before you come to the breakfast table. And just that little bit of change in routine was really helpful for him. And I would just constantly remind him that before he could sit down for breakfast, he needed to get dressed and that I would be available to him if he needed me to help him get dressed. 


And I would offer that to him, which before I had a really hard time offering that to him, when we got dressed after breakfast. Because then my brain started to get this natural sense of urgency, like, we got to get dressed, we got to get going. I got to get dressed, I got to get going. And so I didn't have kind of a mental space to help him, but by just doing the little switch, getting them dressed before they came to breakfast, it felt like I had more space to be attentive and to be available, which caused a lot less conflict and problems. So I troubleshooted that. 


So if you have a regular problem spot, a regular spot where your kids are resistant or there's always kind of a struggle or you tend to get really angry, like, take some time to consider ways to get around that, to do things a little bit differently that might mitigate that or might make it a little easier for you. You could just brainstorm that a little bit. Some of your ideas aren't going to work, that's fine. You're not looking for the perfect solution.


Experimenting with the belief that ‘I could make this a little bit easier’.

You're just trying to come up with a list of 5-10 things that you could try to do a little bit differently, to just have this mindset of experimenting with the belief that, yeah, I could make this a little bit easier. Let's problem solve for that. 


Schedule time for your home to work transition.

Now, the second thing that you can do to make your home to work transition a little bit smoother, a little bit easier, setting yourself up for success is to give time and space for it for a while. I used to take morning meetings immediately after I got home from dropping my kids off, but inevitably, I never really felt prepared or ready or I was often running late. So I just learned that I can't take meetings until at least 30 minutes after I got home, because that gives me enough time to run late. If I'm dropping my kids off for some reason that runs late, it gives me time to grab another cup of tea, to kind of resettle myself and to do this transition. 


The first 30 minutes, I don't even turn on my computer. At least I really try not to until I have sat down and processed my emotions, done my intentional thinking exercise. And then after that, that's kind of like the sign to my brain, like, okay, I'm ready to begin. And then I turn on my computer and then I start doing my emails. 


You're probably going to have to troubleshoot for how to do that. I know for a lot of my clients that go into work, this could be a real struggle for them. Because as soon as they walk in, people need them or they're getting into conversation with people that goes all the way up to their first meeting and that eats away at that 15, 20,30 minutes that they have before they have to really get going. And so there's going to be some trial and error with this, right? 


You're going to have to experiment with the right time. Maybe you're going to have to do it before you leave the house. Or maybe you're going to have to do this transition in the car. Or maybe you're going to have to sneak into the office and slip into a back office for ten or 15 minutes before you engage with anyone. Maybe you're going to need to block off your calendar so that no one can schedule a meeting with you first thing in the morning. Or maybe you're going to need to sit in your living room in your house instead of doing this task right at your desk in front of your computer so you're not tempted to log on. 


 If you believe this is the most important thing you can do with your time, you will figure out how to make it happen.

You're going to have to troubleshoot how to do this and you will do that if you believe this was important, if you believe this was the most important thing you can do to set yourself up for success during your work day, if you believed it was more important than even getting one more thing done or being responsive to your emails or being attentive to your clients. If you believe this is the most important thing you can do with your time, you will figure out how to make it happen. That's what I want to leave you with today. I want you to answer these questions. 


  • Why is this intentional home to work transition practice the most important 15 minutes you could ever give yourself in your work day? 

  • Why should you prioritize it? 

  • What do you gain from prioritizing it? 

  • What do you lose when you don't prioritize it? 


I want you to literally stop the episode right now. Write these questions down and answer them. Or if you can't answer them right now, decide to write them down and answer them the very first thing tomorrow morning. 


As always, if you are looking to be more productive at work and feel more successful in your career while feeling like your family is the number one priority in your life, I can help. 


This is the exact work that we do in coaching together over the course of six months together and I would love to talk to you further about what that looks like. Don't forget you could take me up on a free coaching call. That's where the process starts. I call this a breakthrough call, and you can schedule yours at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book for us to find a time to connect. I will, of course, put that URL in the show notes as well, along with all the other things that I said I was going to link to. Working Moms, I hope that you are having an amazing holiday week and season. Let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson