The 5-Minute Recharge
New Dad life can be a constant carousel of commitments and demands on your time, energy, and efforts. The ride speeds up and the challenges compound when you factor in work responsibilities and social obligations with friends and/or extended family. How are you supposed to get to Dad Zone Thriving when you feel lost and overwhelmed by the challenges of Dad Zone Surviving?
I’ve spoken about your core nature’s Sacred Individuality on my Baby Talk Podcast and elsewhere. However, this blog’s specific topic is a little more here-and-now and is almost always an immediately available option designed to ground you deeply in the present moment, empowering you to make better choices in regards to your current and upcoming challenges. As they say, you can’t pour from an empty cup, and you certainly can’t thrive if you can barely survive.
One of the first things I ask of my struggling Dad clients is for them to consider all the important distinctions that can be made, at multiple levels, between what they can control or influence, and what they can’t. And the very first distinction to be made there is simply to recognize the foundational importance of seeing themselves primarily as individual Agents, with limited resources under their direct control.
In my Executive Coaching work I call this the Agent vs Arena discussion. You are the Agent. Your environment – and everything in it – is the Arena. It’s almost always easier to focus you change efforts on yourself as an Agent rather than on the surrounding Arena. The focused 5-Minute Recharge can be a powerful tool to help you as the Agent, both in body and mind, claim your individuality and give it a chance to rest and reset.
Here are the 8 basic steps to your 5-Minute Recharge:
1) Create the boundaries. Sometimes that is easy, like when you are in the car on your way home from work or errands and you can simply pull over and park. Other times at home you can tell your partner that you need to be 100% off-duty for a short break. Regardless, you need to be intentional and create the dedicated window for the Recharge. Turn off the TV, close the laptop, and bring your attention 100% back to yourself.
2) Set your intention. This exercise has the explicit goal of recharging, and that goal needs to be acknowledged and owned first with intention, and then with attention. Your mind may indeed wander, but for now it’s important to bring a certain degree of clarity and focus to what you’re trying to do here.
3) Sit comfortably. Really feel your weight settle into the chair or couch. Take a few seconds to connect deeper into your body here, and then shift around a bit to find that next level of connected comfort.
4) Close your eyes. Cutting off your visual input frees up huge amounts of your brain’s energy and attention.
5) Focus on your breathing. Deep and slow in-breaths, followed by full exhales. These exhales can be given some extra oomph with a little sound and/or arm movements. The goal here is for each exhale to ground you deeper in the moment, and oftentimes extra body energy can be pushed out more easily with sound or arm moving assistance.
6) Visualize your core as 2 big chambers. The first is a battery slowly filling up and turning green, the second is a red waste center slowly emptying. Each in-breath adds more green energy to the first, and each out breath clears out more red waste from the second. The clearer the visualization, the greater the impact.
7) Charge your battery. Do this breathing visualization for at least 3 minutes, and longer if possible and/or needed.
8) Reconnect with the Arena. When your time is up, take one last extra deep breath to pack it all that energy in, and one last extra deep exhale to sweep the last remains of waste right out. Open your eyes, stand back up, and bring your attention back on-line. Finally, shift your intention from “recharge” to “reconnect with the Arena.” Specifically, it should be “reconnect with Mama” if she is nearby, followed up actions to do just that.
Ideally you are now feeling more grounded and rooted into your core. From here it should be easier to then reach out and connect with Mama from this stronger sense of internal coherence with yourself. Rather than blindly reacting from frustration when things get a little wonky, you may find it easier to respond with care and concern. And most importantly, you might discover empathy and love shining through your Protect & Serve mantra more easily when Baby and/or Mama is struggling and need more help from you.
