How caring for my father reshaped my understanding of leadership.

Recently, I’ve been helping my dad with more and more of his health needs. He’s almost 5 years into a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, and it was time for me to take more of an active role. Becoming a more active caregiver transported me to a world of uncertainty. All the rules that used to work for me — time management, project management, personal accountability — stopped working, and this forced me to rethink my approach to life. I have only recently realized that caregiving was quietly becoming one of the most powerful leadership development experiences of my life.

Lack of Control

A few weeks ago, we had a routine doctor appointment throw shrapnel across my schedule for the day. What started as a simple 30-minute appointment ended up being a day with two doctors’ appointments, a run to the emergency room, and a hospital admission. Sure, maybe days like those are outliers — once in a blue moon. The more common is the appointment treadmill we are experiencing at the dermatologist’s. Dad’s years in the Florida sun are catching up to him. We will schedule an appointment to have a spot examined, then another to have the spot biopsied, and another to have the spot removed. In the interim, we discover yet another spot that looks suspicious. In short order, new doctor’s appointments start popping up like a game of whack-a-mole. I try to keep Mondays free, so I can run client meetings, but Dr. So-and-So is only in the office on Mondays, so I have no other choice but to take the Monday appointment. Despite my best intentions and calendar wrangling, I’ve learned that lack of control is the new normal.

Long-term planning for me is a window of 24 hours

Lack of Control used to drive me nuts. I used to think I could push through. If I just leaned into the problem hard enough, it would go away. For me, that is a perfect recipe for high anxiety and overeating. As I’ve matured, I’ve started to pick my battles rather than fight everything. In this phase of caregiving, I’ve simply come to terms with my schedule not being in my control. I am at peace with it. Sure, I still have goals, deadlines, client deliverables, and meetings, but I’ve had to let go of the illusion that these things will happen on my chosen due date. How about you? Are there areas in your life that you are willing to put on a shelf for a season?

I’m largely self-employed. Are Dad’s care needs affecting my business? You bet they are, but I am showing up anyway. Yes, I have some new projects I want to take to market, but I am just not able to get to them right now. I don’t have the bandwidth — and that’s ok. In favor of Dad’s care, I’ve chosen to let my career stall for now. Don’t we all have seasons like this once in a while? Are you in such a season right now? If you’ve been in an organization for any length of time, you’ve started to get a sense for the seasons it experiences.

A Chosen Stall

Chances are good that you’ve already lived through a chosen stall. During belt-tightening, you’ll see spending on training get trimmed, advertising often takes a hit, and current positions don’t get filled if someone leaves. If you are eager to push your career forward this season, you spend most days being frustrated. Instead, the wise buckle up for the long haul, knowing the landscape will look much better in eight to ten months.

Staying At Your Post

If you have a certain amount of life experience under your belt, there is no doubt you’ve found yourself fully in the middle of a situation you didn’t create. A reasonable person could assert, “Hey, I didn’t sign up for this.” They would be right to do so. Rather than bail, you stayed anyway. You could’ve stayed for a number of reasons. Maybe nobody else would pick up the banner. Maybe you stayed because it was the right thing to do. Either way, you stuck it out. You were committed. Choosing to remain when others would cut bait and run shows an extraordinary degree of self-discipline.

Certain Important Things Have to Take a Back Seat

Good luck if you’re trying to grow a career and outpace your peers at work if you find yourself in a season like this. Your life is completely unpredictable. You have no idea what the next day is going to bring.

You Will Learn a New Level of Humility

I used to think I had my act together. I used to think that I could outsmart, out hustle, or outwork whatever problem threw itself in front of me. I now look back on those times laughingly, and I shake my head. Long-term planning for me is a window of 24 hours. If I can string together a solid 8-hour working day, that is a win for me.

Self-Care Is a Must

One of the ways that I deal with the pressure of the season of my life is by writing. I’ll start journaling thoughts and penciling in sentence fragments here and there during the day, and then I will eventually put these together and do some coherent thought later in the evening. It has been lifesaving.

It could be binge-watching your favorite show. Perhaps, having an adult beverage. Maybe you destress with a quick call to your kid who is in college. These items are things that are easiest to be crowded out of our lives. When things get busy, we know we should “call mom to check in,” but it’s one of the easiest things to get pushed off the radar for the day. Make time for these things. Even if all you’re doing is just leaving a voice message, make time for it.

If you find yourself in a season where life feels stalled, unpredictable, or heavier than expected, you may be receiving a kind of leadership training you never asked for.

In my early days, I thought leadership was having 500 people reporting to me, having a big title, and setting direction for the company. Now with a little more life experience under my belt, I can see that leadership is usually much more quiet than that. Leadership looks like staying at your post when it would be easier to walk away. It looks like carrying responsibilities when no one else will. It looks like adjusting expectations while still moving forward. In other words, leadership is a byproduct of enduring tough situations.

Some of the best leaders out there are leaders because their situations required it.