by This question comes from Brian. He has newborn twins and he’s also juggling his own business, a consulting practice. He has kind of hit the wall. He says there’s been an explosion of responsibility and he’s having a hard time juggling his business, his customers, and his twins, and he asks if I have any suggestions.
Your Twins Won’t Always be Newborns
Frankly, with newborns, you are in a real difficult time for the twins. You’ve got weeks of sleep deprivation piled up, and work commitments that haven’t relented. That’s not a good combination because you’re physically and mentally exhausted, and you have not found a break. Take heart that your twins will soon start to sleep in longer stretches, and they will be in a more healthy pattern. This pattern will emerge slowly over time, and it will help ease up your burdens on the home front. It will give you some relief and take off some of the pressure that you’ve been feeling.
Your concerns about juggling the stresses of work while also trying to balance home are completely valid and understandable. Being the father of twins puts a lot of things into perspective. Particularly the complaints, or stresses, or difficulties of other people at work, or clients where the things that they’re describing kind of seem trivial to you as a father of twins who hasn’t slept very well, who’s having physical and mental stress with the twins. So having newborn twins definitely puts everything in perspective and may give you a tendency to minimize some of the things coming from your clients, and that’s completely natural.
Developing Supportive Relationships
One thing that you might try to do is look at your current list of clients that have stuck with you despite the challenges that you’ve been seeing, and look for some of the common personalities or characteristics of those folks that make them good clients to you then use those to build up your ideal client base. Even if you, listener, don’t have your own business, and don’t have your own clients. Perhaps you’re just working at an office. You may want to gravitate more towards those people who have been sympathetic to you as a parent of newborn twins, and build more relationships with them, and foster those working relationships as you go forward with your twins.
So hang in there; being a father of twins slowly gets easier as time progresses. It just doesn’t, unfortunately, happen all at once, like we’d hope.
This question was originally addressed on the Dad’s Guide to Twins Podcast Episode 57: Long Distance Father/Twin Relationships, Finding Caregivers, Newborns and Running a Business.
Picture by Dan Harrelson
