 So welcome to Mental Wealth TV. I'm Emmie Golding, Director of Psychology for the WMHI and I'm here with Peter Diaz, CEO. Hi. And today we're talking about how to survive living and working from home together with your family. This is something that's come up a few times in our training courses and definitely in conversations with people around the world who are now in that interesting position of being at home with their family. It's not only relevant for people that work together now, but we see a lot of people retire later on. Yes. And then they spend all the time together and they don't have the skills that they could have used their lifetime to develop in order to make those retirement years a lot more pleasant. Their relationship fails because they don't know what to do with each other. For us, a bit of disclosure that's not new. We've been working and living together mostly from home for the last 12 years, so we are married. So from a personal perspective, there's tips and strategies that we can share that have been helpful for respecting your DNA. Respect is an important component. Personally, I enjoy working together with you. There are certain times where we can have really exclusive and creative discussions and there's a lot of emotion and passion behind it. We can have arguments, but we have learned the techniques on how to unravel that and work for us. The creative process might not be fun, but what we come out with later, it's really worth it. So we have both learned to respect what comes out of those interactions. And that reminds me one thing that is very important is live politics outside of your relationship. Don't bring ideology in. This is not a time to be a chauvinist or feminist or anything with anist. This is you and me sometimes. We allow politics, we allow ideologies to seep into our relationship and then you have to fight. Because ideologies are not fair. They're just ideologies. They're ideas. We like different things. It means the structured person. She's the one that comes up with the lists and the structure and that's her forte. I'm the child of the universe person. I collect information from wherever it is and I bring it together and I do the magic and there we have a direction. Respecting what works best for each person. That was an important shift because we spent a lot of time saying, hey, why don't you do it this way and why don't you do it this way? And that of course a lot of conflict in the beginning, but eventually with a lot of coaching. So we were smart enough to go and get therapy when we needed and that's something I really recommend to people. Go and get therapy or relationship coaching, maybe therapy. It scares a lot of people. But relationship coaching where they can teach you what are the ways of communicating between you that is going to help the partnership. Don't make the classic mistake of not getting professional help until it's too late. And I get it. It's going to cost money and counseling is not cheap. Coaching is not cheap. But I guess, guess what? Divorce is even more expensive. So just fight for your relationship. Not only can you save your marriage, can you have a better relationship. Ladies, you get to talk about things in a much deeper way, which I know that usually women like that. Guys, you get wonking points that sounds very good. It works all over. In every single way that you can think of, it works. But it also works in the sense that it benefits also your business. It benefits your kids, it benefits your families, it benefits your communities, whatever it is. It's win-win all around. Your relationship comes first before the business. We never have arguments at work that come into the bedroom. Now the business is the secondary part. Remembering that that's business. This is something that we're trying to work out and it's not a personal attack. Don't use your leverage in the relationship ever to get your partner to do something that they don't want to do. Sit down and say, well, how are we going to structure this? Who's going to do what? So what we have done over the years that has been very useful is to have very defined job role. If it's your decision to make, you make it. If it's my decision to make, I make it. So working together in the same business, that's like you're in charge of accounts, you're in charge of marketing, you're in charge of administration, et cetera. And the same thing goes though in the household. As you're reviewing, all right, we now have a completely different living situation where we're both at home all day and perhaps the kids are as well, who's going to do what? It's team dynamics, isn't it? And this applies both from the working angle, but also from just how you're going to structure things in your household. You know, what's my most productive hours of the day? Now that I'm working from home, I've got more flexibility, but do I work best in the mornings or the evenings? Can one person handle being with the kids for eight hours in a row without pulling their hair out? Or do we need to split that shift and, you know, take four hours each and divide it up? But you need to have those conversations about how we're going to make this work best for us and our family. It's about learning what works for each and then respect that. It's important to be able to compromise as you're meeting each other's needs in terms of how you work best and function together. But that compromise isn't a sacrifice for the other person. It's a compromise for the forward movement of the team. And you know, at the end of the day, this is an opportunity to learn to work in a loving environment and to also mature, grow and show love to the other person, but also love for their relationship. There will be a lot of people willing to give you advice as to how you should live your life. Don't listen to that. Just, you know, work out what works for the both of you. What is practical? What is the loving thing to do? What is the honoring thing to that relationship? And then keep honoring the relationship and run your life from there, you know, run your business from there. And your business have very clearly defined titles. Titles are very important. You're the director of psychology. You know exactly what that means. I'm the CEO. I know exactly what that means. And there's a respect of that. All the, I guess, emotional responsibility to land on that person who's typically the rock, so to speak. But they can have bad days too. You know, over the course of 18 months, there's stress as too. So sometimes you have to be able to flip that and say, my partner's not having a good day right now. I need to just leave them, you know, or come back to it later. Or I need to be the one to step up and support them right now. And that's okay too. So what about kids? The more kids you have, the greater level of complexity you do have. If they're going to school, at least they leave you to be and do things while they were school. If you're in lockdown and they can't go to school, then you've got that added complexity. But again, I think the principle of the relationship being the number one thing can help in this. Because of that is so stressful. And because they've didn't demand so much attention that there has been a tendency for people to use the iPads, use the devices, use the screen. And I think that's okay to an extent. Because if you're pulling your hair out crazy and you're going to take it out on the people around you that you love the most, then that's not a good thing. But at the same time, we do know the negative impact that that can have on kids. And you do see the behavior escalate when they've had too much screen time. So you kind of, I mean, it's like an addiction really. And so you need to keep that in mind. And we've had to wean ours off of his habit for a different period. It's been a bit too much lately. You're going to have a screen free afternoon or screen free day. That will make your life easier. So three main points for today is respect each other's DNA. So they're different work styles, different needs for space and how they use time differently. Number two, divide up your responsibilities. Make it clear who's leading what parts of work or home life. It's not political. It's teamwork and don't micromanage. And number three is the relationship comes first. So make the time to connect regularly to communicate to have these conversations. Be playful, be humorous, be loving, be kind, be generous. Good tips. We hope you liked it. Please let us know in the comments. Give us a like. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't. And let us know whatever other topics or questions you have about mental health, well-being, resilience, emotional fitness. And we wish you all the best and we love you all. Bye now.