Slice of Life with Pete Trainor
Pete Trainor is the CEO at international healthcare company VALA Health, a best-selling author, and a Member of the Headspace International Advisory Board. Here, he talks about the challenges of parenting during a pandemic, and offers his expert advice on caring for your wellbeing during these difficult times.
What effect has working from home, whilst juggling home-schooling, had on your wellbeing?
Time has definitely become a premium commodity. It’s about finding enough hours in the day to juggle a busy work schedule and full-time job, with giving the children enough support with their school work and wellbeing to feel like I’m doing a good job as a father. I guess the biggest effect is a new sense of guilt that I may be doing neither of these things to the very best of my ability.
What's been the biggest challenge of this latest lockdown – personally and professionally?
Staying positive when every day feels like groundhog day, with no real reward at the end of it. I think last year there was a sense of communal novelty; plus we had a break over the summer. But this time it does feel like there’s no real end in sight. We can’t even book a holiday to look forward to, or plan any trips to take our minds off the situation. So that has an impact on me emotionally and physically.
You recently posted on LinkedIn about looking at the positives of lockdown; what advice would you offer to parents who might be struggling?
[Pete’s LinkedIn post.] I am so driven to try and focus as much as I can on the things I can control, and not the things I can’t. That’s hard and exhausting to sustain, but it’s almost an absolute requirement; otherwise, you risk being sucked into quite a dark place. I feel really grateful for the new volumes of time I spend with my kids. I also feel grateful to be solving unusual work challenges under strange and compressed conditions.
I think the best advice I can offer other parents is that we’re all in the same situation. You will not speak to another working parent who isn’t feeling their own version of the same pressures. So empathy and understanding for all of us is key to surviving the challenges of this ever-changing situation.
How can employers support parents who are juggling the demands of work with extra pressures at home?
A lot of employers are already doing a great job in my opinion. I’ve heard a lot of positive stories from parents and people who have had an astonishing amount of support from their bosses and team members. If anything, I’d urge employees to be a little bit kinder to their employers sometimes. They’re operating under some incredibly complex pressures, and we’re not trained to deal with something like this. We’re just humans.
And finally, how can parents better support the wellbeing of their children through this time?
I think we all have to do what we have to do in order to come out the other side of this marathon as better people. There will be things that some parents normally limit, like screen-time, that you just have to relax and let go of during lockdown in order to get enough hours to do your job. It wouldn’t be bad advice to tell every parent to try and find a couple of selfish hours for themselves every week either. I’ve tried to stick to my two hours of fitness training a week, even though it’s had to be at 7am not 9am now. It’s my time, and it helps to ground me.
By taking time for themselves, parents will feel more balanced, and that cascades down to their kids. Remember to also spend some time with the kids doing something FUN that they want to do. Play Lego or jump on Fortnite with them for an hour. Level with them and just be a team.