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Help Me!
Need advice managing your hectic household? Ring up a family coach.
A couple of years ago, when Ann Matturro Gault was moving into a newer, bigger home in New Jersey with her husband and four children, she found herself struggling to balance family and work. "I just felt really overwhelmed," she recalls. "I was trying to keep a career going. I was moving and setting up a new house. It was really stressful."
She figured that her new home, within sight of the golf course at her country club, was a chance for a new start. But she needed help. So she called Kathy Peel, a family coach in Dallas who has trained more than 200 other coaches.
Peel, who has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and is the author of The Busy Mom's Guide to a Happy, Organized Home, emphasizes managing seven distinct departments at home, with parents taking cues from successful business managers. "No one says I will create a chaotic life at home," Peel says. "They're overloaded, just get on a fast pace, and life gets out of control - and it can do that pretty quickly."
Family coaches are offshoots of the coaching industry that has boomed in the past two decades. According to the International Coach Federation in Lexington, Ky., credentials awarded to coaches rose 585 percent from 2004 to 2007. A report by Tampa, Fla.-based Marketdata Enterprises Inc., released last fall estimates that personal coaching of all types, including fitness, financial, business, and family coaching, yielded $1.29 billion in 2008.
"It's very typical for families to have parenting challenges at different times in children's lives. There are lots of books on parenting, but they don't necessarily fit a family exactly," says Catherine Pearlman, a former social worker turned family coach in Westchester, N.Y. "A lot of parents have the right idea, but somewhere along the line they have gone wrong or are not where they want to be. They could be living happier lives with their children with just a little bit of coaching."
At a Crossroads
To Gault, peel was a fellow working mother who understood her challenges. Gault's children (three girls and a boy) were getting older - they were 4, 6, 8, and 10 during the move. She was making the transition into a new house with better organization and storage and into the next phase of child-rearing. She didn't have the time to think about her problems and seek solutions.
It's a common complaint Peel hears from many clients, including successful professionals with doctorate and master's degrees. She has walked into homes where the family couldn't eat dinner together because the piles overtook the dinner table or where the kids were often late to school because they didn't know where to find clean socks and underwear in the clutter.
"Accountability is the key to making change," she says. "You have an encouraging coach to whom you're accountable and who is your cheerleader." The coach also can help you gain leverage with skeptical teens. "It's not like, ‘Oh, mom's trying something else,' " she says. "It's the expert telling us it's going to reduce stress. Let's all work on this together."
Peel breaks down managing a family into seven departments:
1. Home and property - overseeing asset management
2. Food - meeting nutritional needs
3. Family and friends - fulfilling your responsibilities in your relationships
4. Finance - managing your budget, paying bills, and investing
5. Special events - planning occasions like birthdays, holidays, and vacations
6. Time and scheduling - managing the family calendar
7. Self-management - caring for your body, mind, and spirit
Peel's clients initially take a 30-minute online assessment that she uses to identify which of these departments pose the biggest problems. "Everybody is usually good in two of those departments, out of control in two, and OK in the other three," she says.
Plan of Attack
After sizing up the Gaults, Peel produced a 46-page "Makeover Action Plan" that particularly focused on "home and property" and "time and scheduling," the departments they handled with the least success. For each category, she suggested "tackle now" items and "tackle next" ones. For example, Peel helped Gault set up a Control Central that features an "in" box for each of the kids, a mail center, and a family calendar.
"In any office or any business, you have a base of operations," Peel says. "Every home needs a base of operations, too. You cannot run your home from a one-inch screen on a PDA. Everybody has to see who's going where, when. Control Central is where you keep grocery lists, phone messages, supply lists, receipts, where everybody knows the information they need is."
Making this one major change reduced Gault's stress significantly. Posting the calendar makes her consider a week at a time, not a day at a time, forcing her to think ahead and plan better. Car pools to her 13-year-old daughter's various sports and activities were a "pain in the neck" to organize, but now her daughter arranges them with her friends. "She tells me when I'm driving," Gault says. "That is great because it works for me. I have too much in my head and Kathy helped me see that my kids are at an age where they can contribute more."
Peel says delegating responsibility and caring for yourself are things any good business manager does. "You have to practice executive neglect. You can't do everything," she says. "You have to make sure you are delegating and are carving out time to do to the best at your job by doing the things that refresh you."
Building a Team
Involving the family is a key Peel principle. She stresses that parents need to hold regular family meetings, put duct tape over their own mouths (metaphorically, of course), and just listen to their kids. That often involves moving toward the middle on issues. Gault, for instance, used to e-mail her husband at work, thinking it was more efficient. He thought that was too impersonal, so now she calls him for a few minutes each day. "You have to be willing to be part of a team," she says.
To Peel, Gault's actions are indicative of a student who has learned her lessons and applied business principles successfully at home. "If you want to build a family team, you have to empower that team," she says. "They get a say in what would make home a good place to be."
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