Captivate Podcast: How to Caregive Like a Boss | 010

Welcome. Today, I want to speak about how to care, give, like a boss, family caregivers. Are your emotions derailing your self care? Are you a caregiver? Or do you give care? Another way to say that is, do you care? Give. Mr. Webster, forgive me, please. I think we need a new word. It may sound funny at first, care give, but hear me out on the idea behind it, which is important to survival for caregivers to care give. No, it's not a word yet, but we need to invent it so that people understand that we are doing something. We often use the verb care, but that includes emotion as well as personal service, so it mixes them all together, which is where we get into trouble. Care seems to imply that we will do it all. We hear people ask, Don't you care when they're looking for some action from us, at least an expression of our feelings? If caregiving were only about the feelings, it might be more doable. The reality is, our feelings of love underlie all the actions we must take, and those actions are the visible evidence of our caring, though we often need to hold them back in order to get the more demanding jobs done. This is why we need a new word to distinguish the management of a person's care from the feelings of it. Sure, the feelings and tasks are related, one causes the other, but it creates an awfully big drain on you as a caregiver to have to do both things equally well at the same time while caring for yourself. And it doesn't seem realistic to think that a person can do both at the same time every minute of the day, some have gotta give, as they say. Then two, there's the problem that love confuses our choices and kindness prevents us from doing some of the hard but necessary things. If you think of yourself as a manager, you can empower yourself to act and not just be, as I've shown in my just released book, the share giver in the crown. The way to empower yourself is to remember that you care give and you're the best way to care for yourself, the best way to do it is to manage your loved ones care rather than doing it all and forgetting about yourself. This is what I mean by caregiving like a boss. In most jobs, the boss is allowed to go home at some point during the day and restore him or herself in caregiving. 24/7, there's nowhere else to go, so you need to care give like a boss and find that respite management skills are your best friend when you're caring for a loved one. But which are you? Are you that I'll do anything? How deep is my love till death. Do Us Part? Kind of caregiver, this poses some risks to your well being. It's so romantic, but possibly also self harm. At the same time, as I've written in, the rational caregiver, putting love first will put you in line for financial, emotional, mental and physical challenges you may not be able to overcome if you've exhausted all your resources. How can you care for someone else? Or do you manage and practice rational caregiving? Here are my objectives for effective caregiving, decision making, cost saving, communication, time management, delegation, planning, leading, organizing and controlling. Now these may sound like a strange language to people whose primary motivation is to be loved, and while you could argue that there's love underpinning them, I do want you to keep them separate in your mind for a minute, because I imagine that you've also heard of caregivers who die before their loved ones. I experienced this in my own family. My parents, both caregivers, were taking care of each other, and we were so shocked when my mother, who was 10 years younger, died before my father. It happens. Please remember, caregiving is not a popularity contest to see who can overwhelm herself or himself. First, my boys used to call me grammar girl affectionately. But. Because, of course, I would gently correct them in their way of speaking. Today I'm going to set grammar girl aside for a minute here and exercise my poetic license to create a word when there isn't one, and I hope it helps you decide how you're going to play your role when you are doing caregiving. You see, we love that word, caregiver, and it's a noun that says what a person is, their essence, but it doesn't say what a person does. So I'm trying to invent a new word. I'm creating a verb from caregiver, and that word is to care. Give that phrase an infinitive, which we could use as a verb. You won't find it in the dictionary, believe me, I've tried, but it is an important distinction to make. Why you might ask, well, a noun is a person place or thing, so a person, place or thing can act or be acted upon, but they're not the action. We're not saying that they do anything. Going back to grammar, girl here now remember that the verbs do the work of the sentence. Verbs, we like to say, carry the freight. They carry the load of action. When I'm being a caregiver, I'm pretty active because I'm responsible, and I do things if we take that away, if we take that agency away by using a noun instead, the caregiver is the one who is acted upon and has a lot of trouble doing the actions that are necessary because of the exhaustion and possibly a lack of empowerment. So my idea of rational caregiving has a lot to do with making that noun into a verb so that you can care give like a boss. Does that make sense without the verb? We may have some confusion about what caregivers do. They're not just empaths carrying the freight of feelings of the situation, and you can't just put them in a corner while important discussions are being made. Notice that care the verb and a noun has many meanings. Caregiving is a verb form, but it's not quite there. Yet. It's not an infinitive. It doesn't mean to act. It's a process, the way caregiving itself, the activity has evolved. That's another noun has assumed a certain amount of passivity in the caregiver. Caregivers take orders from patients, medical professionals and other family members, as we understand it, they aren't perceived of as decision makers with the emphasis on feelings that we make, we ignore the capability they have to face the challenges they meet with skill and Experience and yes, love, considering all the demands caregivers now face, that ideal of the caregiver should be ancient history. It's an old archetype. If we accept care give to care, give as an active verb that requires respect, recognition and respite, two lives may experience well giving well being that of the caregiver and the loved one. So why are these important? Well, in coaching people, the word respect, as someone I coached once said to me, Well, I'll call her Lena here for privacy, the doctors were ignoring me when they asked my loved one whether he wanted to be in a facility or at home for the treatment. No one ever asked me if I had the capability to handle IV medications. I was afraid of needles. I was floored. I felt unloaded on I didn't even think to interrupt.

So that was what happened to respect, recognition. Another person shared with me that she felt invisible when the family had meetings with the doctors, no one asked her a question or for her input on major decisions about their dad, because she was the caregiver taking orders, she had knowledge that no one else had from caregiving for their loved one every day, and yet no one asked her a thing. Everyone else offered opinions, but hers were often squashed. Respite was the third thing I mentioned. Ernesto confided in me that he loved his wife so much, but he was having difficulty following through with the 24/7 routines expected of him during her recovery from an accident. He knew there might be resources to help him, but he felt he couldn't take the time away from caring to search for them, let alone take time for himself. Health, that romance of love conquering all doesn't seem plausible in today's complex world of treating disabilities and illnesses, often it comes down to a difficult decision, will you choose to die for love, absorbing all the slings and arrows as you sacrifice yourself for another, or will you care give like a boss in the end, I think people will love and respect you more for doing an effective job and managing the day. That's the three R's, recognition, respite and respect. In a nutshell, you will fare better if you care, give on that knowledge. Why not give it a try? Let's be rational about this huge demand try rational caregiving and empower yourself with share giving. I highly recommend it that's to care, give like a boss. Thanks for listening today. See you next time.