Don't Bring it Home

Happy Saturday and a happy early Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

During a recent lunch with a friend and fellow business owner, we discovered a shared appreciation for how our wives impact our businesses despite not being formal members of our organizations.

I joke with Carolyn, but in all honesty, she is the best CEO advisor that I have. She knows me, she knows my heart, and she holds me accountable to being the person I am striving to be (at work and home).

Last week, as I was writing about core values, I was reminded just how rare it is to bring work best practices into our homes. We’ve put up a wall between our work lives and our home lives to “protect” them from one another.

1. Employers don’t want stress from home to drag down employee performance

2. Families don’t want stress from work to negatively impact the household

Especially on #2, we’ve all heard it or said it. It goes something like this:

‼️ “Don’t bring it home with you!” ‼️ 

Now, wisdom is a real thing. There is dignity in protecting your work and your home. It is not wise to walk into your home and dump your stress onto a friend or family member. It is also not wise to come into the office and swing by your coworker’s desk to vent about your home life for 20 minutes.

That said, I think we need to seriously rethink this phrase!

Consider this.

While kids are young, parents try relentlessly to understand what is going on with them. They ask questions, they pry, they stick their nose into all kinds of things. Why? Because they love them!

It would be way easier for parents to simply make sure their kids are making good grades and to accept the one-word answers most kids give them. When you consider all the other demands that adults face, could you blame them for asking fewer questions and wanting to reclaim some time?

What we are talking about here is an expression of what we discussed in this Hearts > Outcomes article.

Here’s the juxtaposition our culture is creating that I want us to see here.

👍️ When talking about kids’ hearts, we glorify actions that pursue the heart
👎️ When talking about adults’ hearts, we push down feelings and ignore the heart

The YPT didn’t get its name because it is just a trap for young adults. The name is centered around the young professional life stage because it is when this shift takes effect.

As we transition into the professional world, our focus on pursuing hearts is replaced by the countless pressures to achieve life’s milestones. (Your First Job)

👉️ You see, when we tell our loved ones, “Don’t bring it home with you”, they bottle things up and push things down. This eventually hardens and breaks hearts, and as the saying goes, hurt people, hurt people. 👈️ 

This is yet another example of how we’ve allowed the world to break our relationship with work, and why we have to recover a healthy and integrated relationship between work and life.

Human flourishing will increase if three things happen:

1. We encourage our loved ones to open up about their struggles in the workplace

2. We allow ourselves to feel the emotion of our challenges at work, and lean into processing with those we love

3. We collectively commit to having the discernment on when, where, and how to have these conversations

Here’s my encouragement to you as you go into the weekend. Don’t bottle it up. Take some time today or Sunday to write down one feeling you’ve been pushing down, and entrust it to a friend or family member.

🌟 Our work and our life are meant to be integrated. Let’s not fall trap to the belief that we have to put up walls between them! 🌟 

As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to talk and discuss anything from this or prior posts! If you don’t feel like you have that community to reach out to, respond to this email, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to walk alongside you in your journey. And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from this - I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Hope and Gratitude,

Alex