Never make it home for dinner with the family?

Never make it home for dinner with the family?

Feeling like being stretched could shortly turn to snapping?

One senior leader in the second largest government department described how he ‘was clinging on with his fingertips’…..the room reverberated with the echoes of agreement.  This group similarly described working 25% more hours per week compared to three years before and only one in twenty-five regularly took a lunch break.

This was a very typical set of responses within a programme of 25 similar workshops for senior leaders and managers seeking to build resilience to overcome stress and improve all-round well-being.

Whilst self-awareness was high, there was no sign of the situation changing……until we set the challenge to get that family dinner back and be prepared to take some risks with unread e-mails and questioning whether unrealistic deadlines could be deferred.

The workshops were tailored to a series of factors about each group, for example, recorded levels of stress-related sickness absence; prevalence of long working hours; results of staff surveys outlining low engagement and concerns about decreasing discretionary effort.

So what did they all achieve? One delegate sent a simple message to say he had gone home after the workshop without accessing his e-mails to have the first family dinner in two years; another had experimented with gently challenging selected ‘by return’ deadlines and was pleasantly surprised by the flexibility he was met with; another said that taking time to be in the moment for a few minutes each day had given him the confidence to stop his habitual need to respond to management requests within his self-imposed 10 minute rule.

If any of this strikes a chord and you want to change then please let me know…..take back control