The story built-in your child’s soul

Every day and every moment, a story about you builds, in the mind and soul of those who matter to you and for whom you are counted.

It is a different story than yours.

The current standards in executive professional coaching center us, humble, on the others, on all those around us who have an interest or stake – Prof. Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, or focus us future-back – Prof. Dr. Peter Hawkins.

I am the child of a former Head Nurse of an Intensive Care Unit.

As a child, I would sometimes visit my mother at work. The intensive care unit was like a round theater scene, with human bodies lying on beds placed in a circle. From the center, I was looking at each body through the glass doors. I was having a  sense of strange and cold fear. The life there had nothing to do with the warm outside life. There were unknown laws, and the time flowed differently. My mother was beautiful in her white robe, which she changed when spotted with blood, usually during major emergencies. I liked to visit her in the morning at work, and I liked her there. She was having no fear.

Arriving home, she was venting her nerves on us daily. She used to be upset and quarreling. Usually, the house was being pretty messy. My brother and I were having a great time together, and we were expecting her every day with some concern playing table tennis on the dining room table or other fun games that disturbed the house. After shouting to us, she was going to bed because she was being drained, and her head ached. Each day.

Sometimes, if she had gone to the hairdresser, she would come home beautiful without shouting. Rarely, my mother was sitting on a footstool behind the kitchen door and was crying quietly. I never knew why she was crying. I wasn’t talking to my mother too much. Mostly, I was talking to my brother. At that time, she also had two strokes and was admitted as a patient to another hospital.

With my father, a career officer, I was making some rare but honest quarrels. We were telling each other harsh replies. Shortly after the dispute, I knew it was over, and he forgave me. It was harder with my mother. If I annoyed her, she would refuse to talk to me for days, and that was a really harsh punishment.

Four years ago, I got to know my mother better.

My father became seriously ill, went into a sudden delirium, then brocked his femoral neck. We experienced in the family an unexpected moment of revelation, seeing and finding out the depth and endlessness of mourning. We had lost him in another world, made up of reveries playing with his little children but also of terrible nightmares. He was coordinating war fragments, with terrified eyes. He had become fragile, like the candle flame in the Resurrection nights of my childhood, the flame which I was striving to keep lit, Light coming from Light, all the way home from the church.

 I had begun to feel often a burning and a visceral cry, loneliness, guilt, regrets.

But his suffering seemed even worse than mine, and he needed protection and help. I had to see our past with tolerance and our future with wisdom. I had to act clear and structured, with the hope that we would not sink each other entirely and forever, in pain.

I have implemented a strategy to limit potential losses – be joyful and do something now because it could always be worse. I urgently applied meaningful and disciplined conversations with my mother, choosing to be alert, totally centered on her, her thoughts and emotions, and to support her. After about three months, she truly accepted my father as he had become – with fractured thinking, capable of uttering very few words. She accepted the prognosis of his illness on the edge of medicine and she realized that no one was to blame. After one year, my mother learned that it is not compulsory to persist in sadness and to cry. That she could choose thoughts or actions that shorten sadness. That paying attention also to positive emotions and expressing them in a meaningful way could enrich her life.

Now, quite disciplined, she waltzes. She always liked the waltz. My dad has never walked since then, and his delirium is almost continuous but calm. Every time I meet him, I introduce myself, and he enjoys it finding out who I am. I am pleased so to clarify a bit the confusion that surrounds him.

About my mother, I learned that she is smart, has a sense of humor, and is open to learning, even after the age of 70.

Being a nurse is the vocation of her life. Her current patient, my father has no eschar, is treated with dignity, and is surviving unexpectedly long compared to any statistic.

The approach of our structured and meaningful conversations helped her to create new behaviors for a reasonable quality of life, during a fierce chapter of her life.

As a Head Nurse of an Intensive care unit, and a high performing professional, my mother would have needed the support of an Executive Coaching process to learn some essential skills for emotional regulation, and for managing people and relationships. For the same professional performance, she would have had lower emotional costs and fewer exhaustion periods. She could have known, accepted, and honored her boundaries. She would have learned to focus disciplined on the joy of daily meeting with us as children instead of useless concentrating, responsible, and tired, on the messy home.

Every organization owes to each of its people, essential behavioral competencies training.

What story will you build today in your child’s soul?