Family and Pets

Transcript

Ask your family how you're doing. This is really embarrassing, but it's really important. There's nobody in my life who knows me as well as my wife, and she is the one who knows before I do whether I'm thriving or struggling. So sometimes I'll check in with her and I'll say, "How am I doing?" Or she'll check in with me and say, "How are you doing?" And I have to just be honest and say I'm bored, I'm lonely, I'm struggling, I'm feeling whatever.

If you have family, there's no one better qualified to help assist you through this struggle than those family members, because they love you, they care about you. And if you're working from home, they see you more than anyone else. Listen to them, rely on their advice and their counsel, whether you like it or not. If they say something like "You should go get help," listen to that.

I will share some links in this course for resources that can help you, where there are professionals who do this for a living. Your family is not well suited to help you get through this necessarily, but they are the ones who can tell you, "Yeah, I think you should talk to someone about this" or not.

One way to keep your spirits up is to get a pet. Pets are fantastic for keeping you interested. They are always a welcome diversion and they're usually, depending on the pet, happy to see you. They're a fun distraction. They need a little bit of care, but not too much, and it gives you an opportunity to feel like you have someone else to be responsible for, even if you have kids like I do. I have lots of kids, but I still have pets too.

I have a tortoise, a Russian tortoise. His name is Stravinsky. I love checking in on Stravinsky and seeing how he's doing. Sometimes when it's really sunny outside, I'll take him outside and he'll crawl around on the grass and eat dandelion flowers. That makes me happy.

Some people like other animals like dogs or cats. I do recommend if you're working from home, don't prioritize getting a dog if it's a kind of dog that barks a lot. That might cause more problems than it solves, but cats are great, or dogs that are quiet can be okay. Rabbits, there's all kinds of animals that you can get that are quiet, that don't require a lot of space and that give you another life to pay attention to and keep life interesting for you. So for me, that's a tortoise. For you, it might be something else.