Empty Nester

My youngest son, Luca, is about to go to college (insert, “But you’re too young to have a college student” here). 

He’s one of the 2020 graduates that missed it all…prom, graduation and the much-anticipated Lacrosse match against the rival high school.  It’s been a strange few months for sure. 

In addition to all of that, Covid has blessed me with the opportunity to generally have more time in thought.  When the normal hustle and bustle is slowed - even if it’s just weekend errands - I start thinking.  And, the question that keeps running through my mind is, “what am I going to do when he’s gone?”.  Now, I have some experience already with a child leaving home thanks to my 23-year-old, so it’s less about the fear of Luca on a college campus and independence shenanigans that come along with that.  Instead it’s been about how I will fill my time.  Afterall, wine and Netflix can’t become the long-term hobby that I embrace. 

My husband travels weekly, so it will be me and the dog, Remi, for the most part.  Now, she’s a sweet pup and she’s also really well behaved…which means she’s quiet too.  That doesn’t help when it comes to feeling like you’re in an empty house!  I’ve had lots of ideas on how to fill my evenings:

• I’m really going to learn Spanish now

• I’m going to learn to play the guitar that is gathering dust

• I’m going to be the most fit 40-something year old in Fayetteville

• I’m going to volunteer to go hold babies at the hospital

• I’m going to fully engage in a food-insecurity program to help feed the community

• I’m going to start doing, one by one, those Pinterest DIY projects (thanks for the idea, Mom!)

Here’s the truth though.  I made a conscious decision about a year ago to start loving life again.  Loving life at home and loving life at work.  For me, it meant looking at my skills and experience and figuring out how I could apply them differently in both aspects to really align more closely to my passions.  It meant taking a leap of faith with life at work, despite how much I loved my teams and employer, so that I could also love life at home.  See, I used to be a workaholic.  Yes, I’m admitting it.  If you would have asked me back then, I would have denied it until I was blue in the face.  I would’ve said, “No, I’m just so busy and don’t want my team to feel all the pressure…I can work late again to cover it”, or “It’s just this one initiative, it will lighten up soon”, or “This is just part of the job, we’re all working so much right now, it’s not just me”.  Hmmm.  Sound familiar?

So, as I’ve been pondering the empty nest(ish) scenario in my very near future, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would be considering the same hobbies a year ago.  The answer was a bit painful to process since this is also when I had the workaholic realization.  To save you the suspense, I know I wouldn’t be thinking about fun ways to learn something new or make a difference in my community.  I can say with 100% confidence that I would have been taking on one more project, staying 2 hours later at work, picking up the travel and trying to manage it all so that others could enjoy their lives outside of the office…yup, without consideration of my own life beyond those four walls. Ugh.  I get exhausted just talking about it.

This isn’t about a pity party for Laura though.  I made all those decisions on my own.  And then I finally made a different one.  It was an intentional and very conscious one that I made then and every day since.  It’s no joke that changing 20 years of ingrained behavior is hard to do. 

(Michael Brown interjecting here!) There came a point in time that Laura decided she had to make a shift. I saw it happening over a six-month period. She was waking up to the lack of sustainability of her rooted-in-kindness-and-caring-for-her-team-work-a-holic norm.

I’ve known her since 2014 when she was my client. Everyone on her team loves her, her leaders respect her, and her peers seek her input. Even after leaving her previous role, this continues! She’s the best at what she does and makes everyone around her feel appreciated, valued and effective. Her strategy for success wasn’t sustainable though. She was self-sacrificing left and right. Then she decided to make a shift. Months later she made it. Her husband and family were supportive, and she wrestled through it, she left a great job and a great team to reset. She called it retirement. I called it, preparing for Insight Leadership Group.

Knowing her now, you wouldn’t get a sense that she was ever a work-a-holic. She delivers on every promise and consistently makes sure we are not overworking while making work fun. She makes sure we are valuing our families and following through with the Insight Health Initiative to make sure our team is exercising and eating right. She made a massive change in her life. She was hesitant to put that in here because not everyone needs to, or can relate to, leaving a great career to make a shift. However, you may need to make some other shifts to be healthy.

Now we work with leaders to help them leverage their strengths so they can love life at work and love life at home. I’m forever grateful she made the change!

You might feel the pain points Laura made clear and the answer might not be to find a new job. The answer might be to find a new way to be successful in your role. Okay – back to Laura …

You may not be dealing with kids leaving home, but my guess is that you are also dealing with some type of transition that is weighing on your mind.  Whether it’s dealing with off-site teams, bringing employees back, figuring out how you’re going to deal with your sweet babies that don’t want you to go back to the office, etc.  Change is on the horizon and we can get real about it or try our best to ignore it and fall back into our old routines, doubling down our efforts. 

Choose to make healthy decisions.  You can do it.  Break the script and lead differently through the ReEntry process so you can Emerge Stronger. Purchase and begin the Leader’s Field Guide to ReEntry today.