Episode 109 - We’re All Leaders At Entry Point With CareManity’s Nancy May
As our parents grow old, we want most to repay them with the love and support they have given us by taking care of them back. Nancy May started her business called CareManity to provide family caregivers with structures to obtain practical knowledge, resources, and access to much-needed support. In this episode, she shares with Dr. Tracey Jones her journey to setting up her company, the inspiration for it, and the lessons she learned along the way. She imparts her insights on the price she had to pay for leadership and gives some helpful wisdom on navigating the role. Plus, Nancy also shares some tips for those of us that have been through aging parents or are going through it.
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We’re All Leaders At Entry Point With CareManity’s Nancy May
My guest is Nancy May. Nancy has spent her career working with CEOs, boards of directors, and senior leaders in both the public and private sectors. She is the owner of a new business called CareManity, which focuses on providing family caregivers structured ways to obtain practical knowledge, resources, and access much needed support. I’m done reading her tremendous book and you are going to love learning what Nancy has to say about paying the price of leadership.
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I am excited. My guest is Nancy May. Nancy has spent her career working with CEOs, board of directors, and senior leaders in the public and private sectors. These experiences gave her the strength and foundation to step in and provide her parents with guidance and support, both as their POA and trustee, as they age. We're going to unpack this because she has some great tips for those of us that have been through aging parents or are going through it.
She credits her father, an entrepreneur and innovator in eyewear design, and her mom for encouraging and preparing her to acquire the many skills needed to start and lead several successful businesses. She then transitioned these competencies and life lessons to her new business, CareManity, LLC, which focuses on providing family caregivers structured ways to obtain practical knowledge, resources, and access much needed support. Nancy, thank you for being with us.
Thank you, Tracey. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
For our readers, Nancy and I connected in this wonderful group called the C-Suite Network. She had me on her podcast and we're having her here. This is how our wonderful network has emerged and blossomed. That's where I found Nancy. I got her book and we'll talk a little bit about that at the end. Nancy, I want to talk to you. You've been successful in many different ventures. You know, being successful, there's a lot of stuff behind the curtain that goes into it, hence paying the price of leadership.
My father wrote this book many years ago and it's one of the top sellers because leadership is a joyful thing. It's also a tough thing. I wanted to talk to you about the four aspects of that speech that he calls out in The Price of Leadership. The first one that he talked about was what he calls loneliness. This is tough for us because we don't like to be lonely and we hear that it's lonely at the top. I know many of my friends that have shied away or not wanted to stay a leader because they're like, “I lost my friends. I can't do what I used to do before.” Can you unpack for me, in your particular journey, what loneliness means to you as a leader? Maybe share some experiences in how you would exhort lonely leaders out there that may be going through this season.
That's a big subject and probably could be a show in itself. It is especially difficult for those of us who are extroverts or at least on the cusp of being an extrovert and knowing how to balance being quiet when it’s important and being out there with everything off. No holds barred type of environment. Loneliness is not what I consider a sad thing. It's something that gives you the ability to think a little bit more, especially when you talk about people losing their friends. It's important to understand who your friends and your trusted advisors are, as opposed to the superficial reality of having a lot of people around you. That's a big mistake a lot of people, over the years, acquaint with leaders. They have lots of people around them, therefore they are popular, they're authorities and they're super figures.
I had a conversation a number of years ago with a fellow who was the CEO of a large and well-respected company. When he left the company, he had sent a note out to his whole cadre of friends and colleagues on needing some support for a nonprofit that he was looking for some money for. I donated. I ponied up. I did what I thought was right to support him. He reached out to me and said, “Nancy, you were 1 of maybe 3 people who responded. Why is that? I don't understand. I had all these people around me all the time as the CEO of this major company.” I said, “Joe, what you don't understand is that people were attracted to the checkbook and the title. They may not have been attracted to you.”
Loneliness, for him, came after the fact. He was lost and he couldn't figure it out. I'm not sure if the conversation sunk in, quite frankly. It was an interesting discussion. It opened my eyes a lot more too. It was right there in front of me. I was like, “Duh?” They called it the Duh Factor. Loneliness is not the right word. It's selectivity, of those who are going to be by you and of those that you are willing to lead beside. Sometimes loneliness is good. It's maybe the quietness. It’s the gentle corners that you need to go into to reflect a little bit.
I love that. Instead of rock and a hard place, it’s gentle corners. A lot of people have used in this pandemic, it’s like, “The sky is falling.” I'm like, “I've got more done in the past months, the more clarity that I have in the past years I've been back.”
Times can be a gift.
Especially for people like us that are over the cusp of extroversion. It's like, “Sit down and be quiet and focus.”
“Shut up and think, Nancy.” Your mind is like this.
Back to your friend, Joe. Do you think that was the first time he ever left a job?
No. He’d been with other environments before, but in this particular organization, for a long period of time. I know that he had been in other places. When you get to the top, especially in a situation like that, there are a lot of people who want to gravitate you and they flatter you. Sometimes they say, “Don't believe the headlines in the newspaper. Don't believe your own press.”
That's such a great point. You're the first leader that has brought that out and it's also worth sharing with people. Sometimes people are like, “I can't leave an organization because they'll be lost without me.”
Everybody is replaceable.
I said, “Even the president can get assassinated and there's somebody new. Trust me, you like to think that you're the glue holding everything together.” I don't say this to be hurtful, you'll have a few people that you inspire. Obviously, he had three that resonate with him and believed in him. That's good. Most people are in it for themselves, trying to get through the day. I love that you brought that out. I learned that because I've left jobs many different times. The first time that happened, I'm like, “I'm not it. I'm not the thing that holds everything together. I'm not the life of the party.” People go on. It's good to keep that all into perspective.
CareManity: Sometimes, loneliness is good. It's maybe the quietness, the gentle corners that you need to go into to reflect a little bit.
It’s important that people in their careers, especially if they're with one company for a long period of time, which is not as common. There are still a number of people who do. The pipeline of relationships inside the company or the organization is not where you need to be focused 100%. There's definitely the politics from a career ladder perspective that goes on. Truly, the strength is in who you know on the outside and how you manage those relationships from vendors to friends, to associates, to colleagues, to sports enthusiasts. The color of that mixture is important to creating a career. If we're talking about careers and leadership, that is one that enriches you as well as those that you're leading.
I have never heard anybody say it, the strength in who you know on the outside. That's incredible. When you're gone, they're going to have the next person and you don't want to be back there talking about the way stuff work because there's going to be that divided loyalty. There could be some non-compete. There could be the perception that you're trying to put. I love that, focus on the outside because that's who's still going to be there for you.
The same thing is true with families. Parents pass, the next generation comes along.
My dad talked about weariness. He got some funny things to say. He called a lot of people thumb suckers because he'd be like, “Your thumb suckers are dragging me down. I'm trying to do this, but it's a thumb sucker.” In leadership, there's always going to be some people that step up to the plate and hit the home run and other people that you're like, “Are you even on the team? Why do you even bother? Can you put your uniform on right at least?” It's tiring because people look to you. You’ve always got to be on. How do you handle weariness, especially dealing with an age? We talked about that and me sharing with you. How do you deal with not only leading people but some of the other stresses of life that hit you too?
There are several kinds of weariness. There's mental, physical and emotional weariness. Mental and emotional are not necessarily the same. The physical weariness is physical exhaustion. Your body aches and that can happen for a variety of reasons. I'm not a psychologist or anything like that. We've all felt it. Our mind is tired. Our body is exhausted. Our muscles start to ache because of everything else that's going around. The pressure is going on around us.
I'm not a meditator. I have tried. I can't sit still. I can, but my mind is, “Chatter, chatter.” I've tried to do it and I've done well when I force myself to. It's finding those 5 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is. It's difficult for me. My form of meditation is in the morning, I get on my rowing machine and it's a physical meditation. I throw in my earphones and I podcast and I listen to things. It shuts out the rest of the world and made me focus on something that's for me. That's the way I handle the physical and mental weariness from that point when the mental impacts the physical. It gets my day started. Sometimes I miss it. I couldn't go out and do it because I had to get out early and do some things, but that's okay. I'm going to do some other things in between and I'll be back on and do a little extra row for me.
There's the emotional weariness, which can be debilitating and exhausting. It can break you down in many ways. It’s finding the quiet corners, the quiet time to shut things down. Read a book. Get away from it, whatever it is and read something frivolous if you can. If you like trashy novels or mysteries, read those. Put that weariness and exhaustion into somebody else's hand, a fictional character. Watch a movie.
I'll give you one example. There's a little bit of emotional weariness going on with me and family. One way I escaped with my husband is we put on every murder and mayhem TV Netflix show we could have. It was violence, you name it. We were watching the whole Narcos series in different languages. For some reason, it allowed me to transfer that energy to somebody else. It sounds like a real psycho case. I was like, “When is the next Narcos?” I’ve been binge-watching Narcos. Next, Sons of Anarchy. You name it, there was a list of these shows that went on. It gave me a release. Maybe somebody should psychoanalyze me on that one.
There's the mental weariness because we're pouring so much into our jobs, in our careers or our businesses. There's where I find trying to solve problems a little differently. Be creative. Look at the picture in a unique way. I have a friend that is a brilliant innovator. He refers to himself as a junkyard dog in solving problems, which I love. He's not a praising poodle. He's a junkyard dog. I’d hire a junkyard dog over a praising poodle.
What a cool description.
He played pool as a young man and was in tournaments. There was one particular pool that he had learned and he didn't see the shot. One of the top guys came over to him and said, “You don't see the shot, do you?” He said, “No, I don't.” He said, “I want you to take an imaginary string, put it from where you are to the wall behind the table at about a 30-degree angle. Look at that spot where that string is on the wall and gaze. Don't look at the table, but put the table in the line of sight. See if the shot comes into view.” He said, “I see it.” He made it. In this particular case, I use the analogy that he didn't look at the problem which is where our mental weariness will happen. He looked in the distance but kept the problem a little bit in the fuzzy sight. If you look beyond the issue and expand your visual, your mental, your emotional perspective of things, the solution may come into sight or several. It gives you a way to step back, but still keep things in perspective. I thought it was brilliant.
That's how I handle weariness.
What a great thing. Don't look at the problem, but look past the problem.
Still keep the problem in sight. You're not closing your eyes to it.
It's still there and it's going to get bigger and scarier, but I love it. Somebody told me once while I was at this landmark, it was this landmark forum where you went in and unpacked a bunch of stuff. It was cool. I did it years ago. One of the things is they called somebody up on stage and said, “I'm going to throw something at you, catch it.” Of course, they dropped it because everybody's looking at you. They said, “Here's the trick. When they throw it at you, don't look at it trying to catch it. Watch it come into your hand.” She caught it twenty times in a row. She's like me. If you throw something at me, I'll flinch. I'm not catching it. I try that every time. I'm like, “Throw it to me.” They're like, “You’re going to catch it?” I'm like, “I'm going to catch it because I know that mind trick of what I need to look forward to.”
Don't let it bounce out of your hands.
The next time, I'm going to do it because you said that, Nancy. I love how you broke down mental versus emotional because they are different types of weariness.
You will get the mental and the emotional weariness. Your muscles would tense up. It happens, it’s tension.
CareManity: Leaders don't have to come from the top. Leadership comes from the bottom, from the middle, and the inside and outside.
When you're on the scent like a junkyard dog, you may surpass limitations that you never knew you had because you forget time and you get hyper-focused on it. That brings us to our next topic, which is abandonment. My father would always say, “We're our own worst hindrance for success because we're not diligent about focusing on what we need to think about in favor of what we want and like to think about.” You're talking about people in your relationship pipeline. Having those people that are going to speak into you, you may not want to hear it but these are the words you need to hear. Can you talk to me about abandonment in your career and how you had to deal with that as you took on different roles and picked up different hats?
I'm going to approach this a little differently. There's the abandonment where somebody leaves you and you feel like you've been left out in the middle of the ocean with no oars to row. There's the abandonment that you have to do to somebody else, which is more important. The abandonment of when it happens to you, it hurts. There's physical pain that goes on and you feel that somebody has left you and done you wrong. Don't take it personally. There may be something going on their side.
The important issue on abandonment for yourself when you have to remove the trash or take out the trash. It's not the right way to say that. At the end of the year or the beginning of the year, my husband and I have come to this habit of looking at the people who help us, who feed our heart, our soul, our lives, our business and do good for us and those that make our lives miserable. They don't feed into our hearts. They don't feed into what we're trying to do. They cause us pain and they’re selfish and it's all about them. It takes too much energy. I don't say there's nothing back in return, but they become the balls and chains in our life.
That’s what I call removing the toxins out of your life. You are abandoning those toxins. Not that they're bad people, they're good people for other people. They're not good for you. It's hard to do that. It's painful. It's the weariness that can also happen from that because it's draining when that happens. That is critical to keep a healthy mind, body, a business going because you're not wasting your energy. It's important to think about who's being abandoned and who's doing the abandonment.
Do you and your husband come to a consensus on all of that?
Yeah. Quickly. I'm the one who breaks the chain, but he's the one who says, “This one has got to go.” I’m the door into our family. He's the back office. I'm the front door.
That is such a great point too. As you're developing as a leader, there are going to be people that come into your sphere, even for a season when different things happen. We're doing business differently. They may not have grown with the position or been able to adapt. It used to be fight or flight. You have to adapt. Some people are quite rigid. If they can't bring value, they're not bad people but they're not right for you. I love the way you put that. That's tough. I'll tell you what, that's the biggest thing for leaders because it happens.
Sometimes it works for clients too. I've had a few of those over the years that are not right. You've worked with them for a long period of time and they become toxic for you. You pour your heart and soul and they don't get it. There's the old adage for consultants, “The best compliment is a check that clears.” We do need to make sure that we tap into those clients that they're happy. Even if they want more out of you, you have to put your boundaries on. If they want more and are not willing to pay more, maybe you need to say, “Time to cut.”
That's important too, for leadership because otherwise, you'll get into that weariness. Nothing you do will make them happy. My co-leader, she calls it pee to fee.
You have to make sure that you respect yourself as much as you hope they respect you.
It's like dating when you fight all the time. Why would you want that? I don't like drama. I like getting stuff done. I'm like you. Let's get it done.
That’s not a date. That's punishment.
In the professional world, that's good too. I love that you take stock of everything. I've listened to a lot of leaders and this is critical because you are only going to be looked at as high as everybody else and all it takes is 1 or 2. When you look at all the hours in your day and what is spent on productivity and what is spent on non-value add, I call them time sucks. I started mapping out the days. It's like, “We're not doing this.” Our eyes got big after the first week of doing this. It’s like, “This is the amount of time we spend on these unnamed tasks.” Not even good hunting out opportunities, but nonvalue added stuff. That's what my dad taught with abandonment. You’ve got to prune. I forgot what word you used for it. I like to call it pruning. Every year you’ve got to cut off the dead pieces.
The balls and chains.
You can't get to the next stage of explosive growth if you have these sucker roots or dead pieces splintering off. The last one is vision. Vision means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To my dad, he said, “Vision is nothing more than to see what needs to be done and then doing it.” Nancy, you've been in the business long enough. Big talker, Betty Crocker. Not a lot to back it up. What does vision mean for you? How do you gain clarity with your vision?
Vision is the most difficult topic of discussion because it's different for everybody. Vision could be the vision for the future. It could be an idea. It could be something physically that you see where the opportunities are right in front of you. It could be backward-looking vision, something that's happened before that you can learn from going forward. For me, vision is a variety of those things. As I'm launching into this new area, I see the big picture, which is the vision for the future and the big hope and opportunity where I want this to go. I've got to break it into steps. There are smaller pictures as opposed to the triptych. I'm taking the first portion of the triptych, the three panels. Which panel am I on right now? Which portion of the roadmap that you're on right now? You've got to make sure that your vision is tight enough so that it's exciting and engaging for you and others because you're talking about leadership here.
You want others to be able to engage and want to follow you. The leader can't force somebody to follow them and you can't lead from behind. You have to lead from the front, but you are in the middle all the time because you want people to be out in front of you. There are those that are doers but the heart and center of the body are right in the middle. It's the heart and the gut that's right in the middle of the body, so think about it that way. From behind, you want people to be able to provide that support, that solid connection behind you. You can't have eyes behind you.
There's the WTF vision, the vision where you're so far out there that you’re bleeding edge, not leading edge. Bleeding edge means you're going to get shot, you're going to get killed, and the rest of the leading edge folks are going to trample right over your dead bones, and that's it. You have to balance that excitement and engagement of where you want to be and sting out far enough to make it purposeful, exciting, and engaging for you so you can still execute.
The Price of Leadership
How do you get those amplifiers for that? Is that a daily type metacognition, where you take little steps and reflect back? I know you're in the C-Suite with me with a lot of wonderful people. How do you hone that? How do you make sure you're catching everything as a leader you need to know?
That's like the amoeba shape. It's always morphing and changing. I use a lot of what is called sensory components. I listen to a lot of things and I see a lot of things. I've picked them up and just constantly fine-tuning. Like an artist will look at a picture. The canvas starts white and they draw and take things away. They add light and shadows and they remove some colors. It's like that painting component and it's never 100% done until you call it done. The artist truly will never see a painting finished ever. The Mona Lisa was never finished. There was always something else that could happen to it. You have to know that the subtleties, range, and extent of where those adjustments take place are fine-tuning.
That's sage wisdom for leaders because sometimes everybody thinks, “I get it. You go up high on the mountain in a burning bush or somebody tells you what it is, and then you’ve got it.” It's like, “No, it's more subtle and nuanced a lot of times.” My belief system is you only get shown this piece right now. I love how you call them sensory pieces where you're constantly making sense and all this stuff is coming into clear focus. What I know now, I'm a different person than even I was this time because of all the different people that have poured into me over the past. I love that you brought that up.
You have to trust your gut along the way too. That's hard for people to understand. A lot earlier in my career, people say, “Trust your gut. Listen to it, Nancy. It's good.” I’m like, “I don’t know about that.” Every time I question something that doesn't feel right, that's when you fall off the horse or you get a little too bold. I grew up riding and every time I got aggressive, and I know I was going to think, I was like, “I was going to take that job. I was going to do something else. Darn if I didn't end up in the dirt.”
I love how you called it the bleeding edge and the leading edge because I have a couple of mistakes. There are things we call that in the military, different acronyms. What do you do? You get back up and say, “I'm not going to do that again.”
You learn from it. I do a lot of head chatter. I'll have a situation and once the conversation is done, I will talk to myself over and over. I’ll think, “Did I say that right? What could I learn? Did I do the right thing? Did they respond differently? What happened? What could I push a little further? I was never totally satisfied with the outcome, especially if you're in a situation where you're trying to get something right and it's never perfect. Perfectionism is a form of procrastination. Think about that. Next time, you'll do it a little differently, but the next time will be different. You'll have a different level of confidence from the experience that you had before.
That gives you as a leader a more openness to risk and try new things. “It may be a little bit different there. I'm going to try and figure out what I can, a contingency plan,” but there's going to be a Law of Unintended Consequences. I'll deal with it if and when it happens.
Also listen. You have to use your ears. Your ears are your biggest asset as far as bringing that all in.
Ears plus the gut.
Plus the eyes. Plus the head. Now we've turned it into this massive puzzle piece.
That's what it is. They're like, “What's the most important thing about this?” I'm like, “It's a trick question.”
There is no one thing. Like the movie, “What’s the one thing?” “There is no one thing.”
“What's the most important trait of leadership?” “I don't know, but you're going to tell me what you think it is.” “What I think it is going to be completely different.” They're all important. You can't say, “It has to be this.”
It depends on what you're leading now.
It’s how everybody's showing up. Maybe nobody got a good night's sleep last night, and then you're going to have to have a different leadership type of thing. Everybody take a nap or something. I don't know. We have covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment and vision. I've loved your input and insights into each one of them and what they may do. Is there anything else while we're talking to leaders in leadership that you would like to dispense of your wisdom with them?
I would say that a leader is not just one person. It's not a figurehead. We are all leaders even at the entry point. Years ago, I did some work for a large financial institution and they were trying to figure out how to improve the quality of the relationship with the customer. The customer connection, direct telephone, or voice connection was an entry-level person who may have been there for a long period of time, not highly educated and a diverse workforce. The senior management looked down, poo-pooed on them for what they did. These people are critical to the front line.
Like in the military, there are people at the front line that are putting their neck out to save yours. What we did is flip things on their head and say, “You guys or gals at the top, the leaders, you were going to tell them what's going on when you're not around so they know that out of sight does not mean out of mind. It’s a stiff conversation but you're going to put the leadership in the hands of the people way underneath you, which is the front line, and give them the authority to make the decisions that they know are absolutely correct for the customer.”
Those people on the front lines were scared to death. They said, “How do we know how to lead?” They said, “You will know how to lead. You know what's right and you've been trained. You know exactly what to do and how to help the customer. If you can't figure it out, you get somebody else in your team or somebody else across the office to say, ‘I'll get somebody for you to help it and work together to solve the problems of the customer.’”
Their business increased in three months. It was something like a 26% increase in profits in three months. The people at the bottom who were never allowed to be leaders were amazed by themselves, engaged, and excited that they had been given the authority to do what they were supposed to do. They were not put in boxes. That's what leadership is all about. It doesn't have to come from the top. Leadership comes from the bottom, from the middle, and the inside and outside.
How to Survive 911 Medical Emergencies: Step-by-Step Before, During, After!
I love that leader's entry. It is scary because we have been in leadership. We want everyone in our organization to understand they are a leader but a lot of people are like, “I didn't sign up for that.” Monitor their distress and give them the tools if they need help. Even when I came back to run the company, people would call and I'm like, “I have no idea what this person is talking about.” It was only one like five years into it that I could take any call and go, “I'll tell you what to do.”
It's okay if you make a mistake. “I don't know the answer. Let me get somebody else,” or, “Let me go get that copy done for you.”
I was the president of the company and I'm like, “I will find out. Let me check,” but I don't know. Nancy, what are you working on? I want to talk about your book. What's going on with that? Tell folks a little bit about how they can get in touch with you and what you're doing with CareManity.
CareManity is a new business. The name CareManity came out with the idea of bringing care and humanity back together, so hence the name CareManity. It's not just care and humanity for the person and the family member that we're taking care of. In our case, an older parent, but it's also the care and humanity for ourselves. Everybody tells you how to be good to yourself as a caregiver and quite frankly, that's BS in many times because you're under so much stress trying to do what's right. That happens by having the right tools and resources. Like leadership, they're going to evolve and change. Sometimes, you're going to make mistakes, but it's okay.
You should have the vision out front of what you want to achieve ultimately. What's the life you want to provide for your parents or the loved one that you're overseeing? Do you want to be good? Do you want to be kind? Do you want to be gentle? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be strainful or stressful? You may not like them. You want to say, “Screw them.” That's it. Let them be miserable for the rest of their life, which I hope not. Sometimes when you need to walk away from that, that's not good for you either. That's when it's kind and gentle for yourself.
That's what CareManity is about. What we're doing is we're organizing a way to make that path easier for people so that they know exactly what to do or where they are in a given path and how to get to that point for them for the people that they're caring for. The book, How to Survive 911 Medical Emergencies: Step-by-Step Before, During, After! is a book that I wrote with my husband. It’s our first product out there. As a matter of fact, it's easy to read and it's organized from before anything happens so that you're prepared how to help the responders that are there that are coming to a 911 call because if they don't know what to do and they don't know your situation, quite frankly, they lose people.
They've said that. They don't want to do that. Their goal is to transport the person to the hospital. How do you help somebody in the hospital so that you can provide better care for them and you can support the medical team? You’re an integral part of that as a caregiver. In the end, what happens? How do you manage that in a way that is organized and succinct? We don't get into the emotions in this book. It's a practical roadmap with tools, resources, checklists, and everything else. Because we've been going through this pandemic and there are hurricanes, tornado seasons, and whatnot going on, we’ve got a chapter in the end on what to do in case of a manmade or natural disaster.
Things like what happens when the 911 system goes down which it can go down? Think of the fires out in California. The wires are down and you can't get a connection. You could text 911 on your phone. Depending upon where you are, there's a list in the book or a note in the book where you can check to make sure your region has a central office that would then get your text message and make sure that you get the help that you need. That's one example of what goes on. That's what we're doing.
I have a Facebook group called Eldercare Success. Anybody is welcome to join. It's a private group, so discussions there are not open for the public to see. If you join, answer three questions on there. All the time, we’re responding and putting in tips, ideas, and notes to do that. If they want to get more information about the book and get a free file of life, which everybody should have, you go to HowToSurvive911.com. I don't care if you're 2 years old or 1 year old or 129 years old, you need a file of life. It's important.
You said everybody's a leader upon entry. Everybody reading is going to outlive somebody near and dear to them. This book is great because it teaches you how to lead them into the tough stuff and be prepared for it. We need to do that. Many people are like, “What was I supposed to be doing?” If we love one another, we're going to take care to make sure all this stuff is set up.
There's a joy of life coming in when a baby is born. I hate to say but there should be joy at the end of life too. Celebrating what you've accomplished even if it’s been a hard life. There's joy to be celebrated in a good way for the person who's going to depart and for ourselves too.
To let our loved ones know that that's taken care of. They can feel bad or prepare to meet the Maker or just deal with whoever they need to say the what and not have to worry about all this stuff. That's huge.
Make it kind and gentle for you and for them.
Nancy, I can't thank you enough. Your perspective has been enlightening. I've scribbled a whole bunch of notes about the way you say different things. I thank you for your insights, your leadership, and what you're doing to help many people and for being a guest on my show.
Thank you, Tracey. It has been a pleasure and an honor.
You're welcome. Everybody out there, if you like us, be sure to subscribe wherever you follow us, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Breaker and YouTube. Please leave us a review and a comment. Nancy and I will answer. We’d love to hear from you. To all you leaders out there, you keep on paying the price of leadership and have a tremendous rest of the day.
Important Links:
Podcast – Nancy May
How to Survive 911 Medical Emergencies: Step-by-Step Before, During, After!
Eldercare Success - Facebook group
iTunes - Tremendous Leadership with Dr. Tracey Jones
Stitcher - Tremendous Leadership with Dr. Tracey Jones
Spotify - Tremendous Leadership with Dr. Tracey Jones
Breaker - Tremendous Leadership with Dr. Tracey Jones
YouTube - Tremendous Leadership