Feeling overwhelmed by your commitments? Unable to meet demands? Feel like you're shortchanging everybody? Afraid to answer the phone? I'm not talking about your finances. I'm talking about what it's like to be a parent, especially one who combines parenting with a career outside the home. Falling into the trap of constantly sacrificing your own needs for the benefit of others is almost inevitable. However, when you overspend your energy, you end up with a huge resources overdraft. That's when life stops being fulfilling. Everything feels like a chore. Eventually you burn out and everybody suffers, most of all you.
It doesn't have to be this way, says Sharaz Kelly Rowat, an Irish life-coach specialising in "work/life balance". She called me after I wrote a column expressing the view that to martyr oneself, as a parent, is actually a selfish act. She wondered if I knew an overwhelmed parent who would like to try four weeks of life coaching with the aim of finding one additional hour in the day for the parent to use purely for his or her own enjoyment. "Me!" I told her. If she could find space in my ludicrously busy life for an hour of "me-time" she could do anything. Psychological counselling and life coaching are different things. Coaching is a pragmatic way of looking at present issues, while psychotherapy tends to be rooted in the past, says Sharaz. If you need help sorting out emotional issues or a relationship, then find a psychologist and get some therapy before you try a lifecoach. Sharaz, a mother of two children, aged 18 months and six years, is a business psychologist and psychotherapist with a master's in organisational behaviour and six years of post-graduate work in psychotherapy. She grew up in Mauritius with her Irish mother, but has lived here since she was 19 years old. (The usual story: she met an Irish bloke, now a psychiatrist, married him and settled in Dublin.)
Sharaz became interested in life coaching five years ago, when she was working in London. After the birth of her first child she started examining her own work/life balance. She tried various tactics, such as working three days a week and working from home, but remained stressed. "I was determined to offer my skills and talents without being distracted and stressed," she says. She got her own coach, Sarah Litvinoff, a journalist and writer of two books published with Relate, the British marriage and relationships counselling service. Sharaz's experience of coaching was so positive that she decided to become a coach herself.
Sharaz warned me from the beginning that she would be very direct. "I've set myself up as a vigilante on people's time. I get permission from the client to support and challenge through assessment and very active listening," she said. As far as she was concerned, there would be nothing sacred in the way I organised my time, my family life or my career. "We create our own reality," she told me at the first session. Her role is to use her own detached perspective to make me see my "reality" in a new way. She would have no agenda other than showing me that my overwhelming, stressful reality was to a large degree something I had created for myself. I am not a victim. I am mistress of my own destiny. Revolutionary words.
My own particular predicament is no different than that of most other working parents. I work six days a week, often in the evening and weekends. Because I work from home, I have the best and the worst of both worlds. The worst is that I have the stress of work and family under one roof. In order to spend time with my children, I often have to work late into the night or early in the morning to meet my commitments. Sharaz's first advice was to set aside a time everyday when I would do nothing but enjoy being a mother. "We learn more through joy than we do through pain," she insists. She also advised me to draw clearer boundaries between work and home, letting the answering machine take my calls after office hours during my home-time. That was much harder to do than you'd think. The essence of life-coaching is that it teaches you time-management skills and helps you let go of the fear of saying "no". It teaches you to say it gracefully and without guilt - easier said than done. "Guilt is one of the 10 major time-wasters," says Sharaz. When you operate out of guilt, you are immobilising the present. "You go into your past when you feel guilty. Guilt has no advantage whatsoever. Guilt is not a creative process, it just freezes you in that moment of guilt, which makes it completely negative and draining," says Sharaz.
By letting go of guilt, I have given myself permission to leave my desk and pop out of the house for a 20-minute walk. I have actually sat undisturbed and watched Sex in the City (two episodes in a row!). I have read a novel, not for work, but purely for pleasure. The free hour came from that simple measure of dumping guilt and living in the moment long enough to do something fun. As a guilt demon, I was blaming myself for being torn between children and career. Sharaz explained that there was no reason to feel torn: I needed good childcare and housekeeping help, without question. No more making do with au pairs. But full-time help in the home costs £250 to £300 per week! How to find £24,000 per year before tax to pay for full-time childcare? Sharaz turns this on its head. "Get the help in the home that you need, and the money will come," she promises.
Opening yourself to possibilities is a key principle of life-coaching. "It's only when you connect with your values that you can change circumstances which can be chaotic," Sharaz says. She argues that when you design your life the way you want it to be, a lot of positive energy releases itself. A higher power helps you along your way once you tap into it - so my higher power has been working overtime lately. All this positive energy comes back to you in the form of fulfilling work - enough to pay for the childcare support you need at home, Sharaz argues. We'll see. For now, Sharaz has taught me to act on my inner wisdom. She has helped me clarify my values around balancing life and work and has taught me practical ways of putting those values into action. Most of all, she has convinced me that you have to nurture your own creative well, whatever your career. Employers, too, benefit when people feel energetic and inspired - which is why employers pay Sharaz to help their employees learn to balance work and personal life. Sharaz charges corporate clients £150 per hour and insists on a commitment of four hours per month for three months (this also includes e-mail communication and two brief phone calls per week). For working parents, she offers a special reduced rate of £250 for four sessions per month (plus e-mail communication), for a minimum of three months. So, for a working parent, is the £750 spent on life coaching worthwhile? The way I look at it, you can go for retail therapy and spend £200 on a pair of shoes, because all your other shoes are uncomfortable. Coaching helps you to find and wear the right shoes for the rest of your life, so that you can stop experimenting with the failures. So, if you ask me, it's worth every penny. Life coaches Sharaz Kelly Rowat and Margaret Donagh will conduct full day workshops in Dublin on Saturday, March 24th and Saturday, May 26th. Cost: £75. For information, call Coaching Options at (01) 8533960.
