Working Parents SOS - coming soon!
Welcome to Working Parents SOS, a place for working parents to come together and lighten the load.
The aim? To build an informal, friendly community that helps busy working parents feel more resourced and more resourceful. Being a working parent can sometimes feel ridiculously hard and we all need an injection of support and inspiration every now and then. Like all the parents that have come before us, we’re parenting in a world we didn’t grow up in. So it’s no surprise it can feel difficult and as though we’re making up as we go along - we are!
I believe the best way to care for our children is to care for parents, and we’re often pretty rubbish at looking after ourselves. Hopefully this community will help. We’ll be tackling some serious topics along the way but with a large dollop of humour and lightness thrown in.
I don’t pretend to be a parenting expert (whatever that is), but I do have lots of experience coaching working parents. So I’m here to support you the parent, not your parenting. Although that might be a side-benefit if we play our cards right.
Gill Simpson: coach, business owner, mum, wife, daughter, sister, dog-owner, expired-half-marathon-runner, life admin expert, finder of all things that get lost in our house, kids-taxi-driver, Bath rugby fan; book club member… Oh, and chair of the PTA at my son’s school. Because life isn’t busy enough.
Why SOS?
Oh boy, who knew you could have so much fun with three little letters??
Save Our Sanity: The start-point for this whole thing. A space for working parents to feel sane again, or at least feel like there’s a hope that they might reach this state at some point in the future (and not just when their kids have grown up and left home).
Series Of Shorts (or a Series Of Sorts, you decide) providing insight, information, and ideas from the world of psychology, parenting, child development, neuroscience, business, and any others that might prove relevant. All provided in small, digestible chunks. Because let’s face it, we barely have the time or energy to keep on top of our emails, let alone be diving into the British Journal of Development Psychology as our bedtime reading.
Sources Of Support: A place for you to find what you need, whatever that might be. Resources and tools, tips and ideas, connection and community, laughter and lightness. But no wine. You’ll need to bring that yourself.
Sharing Our Stories: Learning from each other, normalising what might feel unnormal, seeing things from a fresh perspective, and knowing that not-knowing something is okay too.
Start Off Small: Rome wasn’t built in a day (Have you been there? It’s beautiful). Rather than trying to ‘fix’ eveything immediately, take a step towards better. Try and change one small thing. See what happens. Learn from it. Then go again.
I could go on, but you get the gist. In a nutshell, I’ve learned loads of stuff as a coach and as a parent over the past 10 years or so that I’d like to share with you. It seems daft not to. I hope you find it useful.
JOINING THE COMMUNITY
A Series Of Shorts
Every month we’ll tackle a hot topic for working parents, and you’ll have access to a mix of articles, reflection exercises, activities, tools, tips and ideas, all easily digestible and super practical.
Topics include: the invisible load, the good-enough parent, making flexible working work, the curse of business, managing expectations, over-parenting, managing emotions, and the age of screens and anxiety.
Sharing Our Stories
You’ll have access to two facilitated group coaching conversations every month: one 60-minute lunchtime session (on those rare occasions you’re able to actually take a lunch break) and one 90-minute evening session (for those able to say awake after 7pm…)
You’ll also be able to book one-to-one coaching sessions if you’d like more in-depth support on a particular topic, offered at a discounted member’s rate.
And you’ll have access to the SOS community: a place to share, chat, ask questions, and learn from others.
Sources of Support
An ever-growing library of resources to help support you, however you like to learn. Including articles, blogs, tools, models, videos, and research.
Guest opinions, interviews, and conversations offering different opinions on the world of parenting, to inspire and challenge our thinking.
“It would be brilliant if…” feedback section: a chance to tell me what you’d like to see, so we can make this community even more useful.
