All of us come home.
Whether we’re accountants or programmers or teachers or farmers or soldiers, and whether it’s daily or weekly or longer, all of us have to step out of the fight and come home.
There’s a completely different set of skills we use when we provide for our families. We have to be decisive, abrupt, aggressive, firm, and for most of us, we have to go, go, go. There’s little rest and less calm, and to survive and perform well, we have to embrace the chaos, and by the end of the day, we’re physically and mentally spent. And if things aren’t going well in our professions, that stress drains our emotional energy as well.
And when we finally come home, at the end of the day or week or trip or tour, we just want some peace and calm and refreshment and consolation.
But if you don’t take some time and transition between your job slaying dragons for your family and your job as head of the castle, not only will you NOT get that peace, but your decisive, firm, tough ‘get this crap done, and get it done NOW’ approach will slam into your wife and children and leave everyone hurt, including you.
We need an AIRLOCK!!!
For those of you who have never been in space, an airlock is the chamber between space and the inside of the space ship where the astronauts go to adjust to the inside. But there’s actually two reasons for the airlock.
The first, of course, is to protect the astronaut, so he doesn’t blow himself to bits suddenly.
But the second and just as important reason is that it’s the place where all the bad things can be washed off and left, so the people already inside don’t die.
All of us need some kind of ‘airlock’ that we can go through before we arrive home.
Next week I’ve got some examples of things that I’ve heard about or known others to do, but until then, can I suggest that you reflect on how you normally come home? Maybe each morning consider how last night went when you ‘came home’, just the first 30 minutes.