STRENGTH, VULNERABILITY and LEADERSHIP

The first blog I ever posted was titled “Life is Now, What are You Waiting For?”

It was written about my mother and how she always saved things for the future that she never really got to enjoy.

My early life experiences created an adult me that struggled with scarcity, saving and worthiness issues that I had attributed to my mother. Well, I lost my mother suddenly last year and as an only child, I’m now responsible for my 88 year old Dad.

As I spend more and more time with Dad alone, during my visits back home, I’m realizing some powerful revelations about us both. Watching my Father slip into confusion and forgetfulness is heartbreaking.

Discovering his tendencies to worry about not having enough, not being enough and his negative self talk has opened my eyes to where these traits in myself have come from. Turns out I’m more like my Dad than I thought.

So much of who we are is a result of the home environment we grew up in when it comes to what we tend to worry about, fear, and how we relate.

To be in discovery and awareness is crucial to making sure our habits, patterns, beliefs and behaviors don’t sabotage our relationships and hold us back from living our best life.

As I enter my sixth decade, I enter a new phase of life that I tried to prepare my parents for. For the past 25 years, they resisted my attempts to help them prepare for elder care as if the effects of old age would not touch them. They resisted, they complained, they procrastinated as if nothing would change in their world.

Now, I find myself scrambling to manage and care for my Dad from 3000 miles away as he struggles with loneliness, depression, and confusion while he falls victim to telephone scammers.

As a result, a new level of strength, coupled with vulnerability, are fighting for my energy in a way that I’m both frightened of and prepared for. Frightened, because it’s new and I have no idea of the level of challenges that lie ahead for him.

But prepared, because of the life I’ve intentionally designed to be available, to be a leader and to have the mental energy and physical stamina for the ups and downs of life and its challenges.

Being in the daily practice of High Performance, coupled with knowing how my Relationship Style effects that performance, has allowed me to marry strength with vulnerability for this next, new phase of life.

The STRENGTH to BE, DO and HAVE what it takes to be there for my Father. The VULNERABILITY to witness and grieve the loss of my strong, powerful Daddy in his new weakened and fragile state. And the LEADERSHIP necessary to move between them both.