Harmony at Home and Work

Published by Matt Mason, 13 Oct 2022

Tania Lopez – one of the fantastic coaches on our Coaching Directory – shares Harmony at Home and Work. The blog explores how family stresses can disrupt the balance between work and home life.

Tania’s coaching profile is the Army of Mums Coaching Directory.

Visit Tania’s Profile

Hello 👋

I am Tania Lopez, a parenting coach and a qualified and experienced hypnotherapist, counsellor and teacher. I help working parents who feel overwhelmed and stressed due to the many competing priorities.

With this post, I will explore the most common factors that cause disruption. And then share my five top tips for mums to help them create harmony at home and work.

The factors that can disrupt harmony at home and work

Lack of support at home and work

A support system is crucial to a functioning and healthy family system. But, for harmony at home, it can’t (and shouldn’t) all be one parent carrying the whole load, both visible and invisible. And for single parents, look for support systems that you can bring in for support.

Support systems may comprise other family members, friends, school/education, workplaces etc.

Lack of clarity around boundaries

It can be hard to identify our boundaries until we feel like a pushover or resentful.

Only when these feelings become overwhelming, do we typically realise we need to take action to restore harmony at home and work.

Be clear about your boundaries and stick to them.

Unrealistic expectations and unfair comparisons

A significant cause of stress is parents placing unrealistic expectations on themselves to be perfect. They may also have unrealistic expectations of their children to behave in certain ways and do well in certain things.

This can also lead to unhealthy comparisons with other parents, children and colleagues who appear to be doing so much better, which can give rise to feelings of failure, guilt and shame.

Feelings of failure, guilt and shame

These feelings often lead to a downward spiral of how well we function, affecting harmony at home and work.

Family triggers can be not spending enough time with their children or using parenting methods that don’t feel good.
Work triggers include having outstanding emails that need a reply and feeling distracted or unfocused.

Both areas affect each other, and without some conscious interventions, both can suffer.

How Full Circle can help with harmony at home and work

Full Circle Hypnotherapy offers a virtual 1-2-1 Empowered Parenting programme that combines coaching and hypnotherapy. The programme uses a 4-step Peaceful Parenting roadmap which helps to guide parents to create harmony.

Hypnotherapy helps parents with underlying issues that may unconsciously impact how they parent, and coaching helps with practical solutions to bring out the best in themselves and their children.

Bringing harmony at home and work: 5 top tips for mums

1. Focus on your values

An essential first step if we want to create peace and harmony at home and in our lives. Identify your values and check if you’re living them. Whenever we move too far away from our values, it creates unease.

Keeping our values at the forefront makes it easier to create boundaries and honour them.

2. Identify your priorities

Whenever it all becomes too much, it’s time to take a step back and check your priorities which should align with your values.

Ask the following questions?

Does it all need to be done by you?
Who else can help?
What can you say ‘No’ to or ‘Not right now’?

3. Self-care

It’s a term that gets a lot of groans!

It’s about finding out what works for you. For example, you may identify sources of support and drain. Then, draw strength from one and reduce the impact of the other.

It could be about identifying an unmet need and working towards meeting it. Just start with one and build on that. Don’t wait to take care of your needs. YOU MATTER.

4. Invite in self-compassion

This is such a crucial point.

Many mums join my programmes to improve their children’s behaviour. However, we must improve our behaviour towards ourselves before improving children’s behaviour.

When self-compassion is missing, we mismanage boundaries and turn to consequences and punishments to compensate for the confusion.

5. Connection

To have a quality connection with children, we need a quality connection with ourselves.

We tap into all our inner resources when connected to ourselves. This helps us to parent differently and move away from wanting compliance through control to cooperation and collaboration.