At the end of July, COVID-19 finally caught up with my household. I felt like we had been playing Dodgeball with it for over two years and it got my daughters and me at the same time. It ended up hitting me hard.

As I lay in bed with a brutal headache, I thought about the journey I had been on over the past 10 years since my brain injury. It has been a wild ride. And, I have remained resilient throughout it all. But, I was tired of being resilient. I was feeling Resilience Fatigue.

I have never heard of the term Resilience Fatigue before. It is something I just coined in a moment of pain lying in bed. But, I think it is a very real thing and it is something I believe many of us are feeling right now.

If you are feeling Resilience Fatigue and it is impacting your life and work, what do you do about it?

Recently, a former Executive Coaching client of mine reached out to me to share a poem her Dad wrote in 2011 when he learned his cancer was terminal. His words resonated very deeply with me. I know a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed, lost and perhaps, even facing their own grief journey right now. My client has graciously agreed to share her Father’s words with you.

Is there something you really want in your life or career right now? You feel in your gut that it is going to come to fruition although you have no idea how. And, it might feel like it could be way out of your league? I learned from my Dad on a cool autumn Thanksgiving evening that this is when we need to tap into our inner knowing and trust. To hold onto hope and belief even in the darkness.

Last week, I attended my first silent retreat at Loretto Maryholme along the beautiful shores of Lake Simcoe, Ontario. I am a big fan of meditation and building periods of silence and stillness into my life. I think we are faced with so many demands each day that sometimes we need to just say stop and get off the hamster wheel for a while to re-connect/or connect with ourselves at a deeper level.

What is important about connecting to yourself at a deeper level?

This picture was taken for my MBA graduation. I had been working for a few years after my university undergrad and then college education when I decided to go back to school on weekends to pursue an MBA. When I graduated from this program, I was 27 years old. I had just signed on for a new job with General Motors and got my first signing bonus. In many ways, I was flying high on life and felt anything was possible. I was smart, super ambitious, and ready for anything that came my way…or so I thought.

After experiencing a brain injury 10 years ago, the death of my Dad and husband, Jeff, to cancer within a few years of each other, and then came the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to reach down deeper within myself than I knew even existed. What have I learned about life and my career along the way? And, what do I wish I could have told my younger self?

I recently spoke at a virtual event about the importance of having coaching-style conversations within the workplace. Before we dive into how you can have coaching conversations to inspire others around you, let’s define what coaching actually is.

What is Coaching? Coaching is the process of helping another individual or group of individuals reflect, learn and create a plan of action to help them perform to the best of their ability in his/her/their life or job.

Recently an article was shared with me entitled, “Welcome to Holland!” This piece was written by Emily Perl Kingsley from her perspective as a mother of a disabled child. But, the person who passed it my way felt it would resonate with me (and it did) and perhaps it will resonate with you, too.

Welcome to Holland!

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan.

In the earlier article ‘Welcome to Holland,’ Emily Perl Kingsley writes about when life doesn’t turn out like you expected it would. Does that concept resonate with you? I think many of us had ideals or hopes in our minds about how our lives/careers/relationships would be in the future, then life intervened and took us down another path.

Perl-Kingsley compares Italy to where we thought we were going in life, but instead, we ended up in Holland. For me, I was in Italy (as shown above in the Isle of Capri, Italy) with my late husband and our firstborn daughter, but also in terms of my life in many senses. I had an amazing husband, a great job, two beautiful healthy daughters, and lived in a nice community. What else could a person ask for? But life intervened…

I recently led a learning session for a company’s internal coaches on resilience. The topic of vulnerability came up. It is interesting how 15 years ago, vulnerability would have been seen as a weakness for a leader to show. Nowadays, particularly since the COVID pandemic, vulnerability is a highly desirable leadership characteristic.

But, as one of the participants in this training program asked me, “How do you become a more vulnerable leader?”

In honour of International Women’s Day on March 8, I would like to share a story about some of the women who helped make me.

The women featured in this blog photo are my Grandma, Great Grandmother, Great Great Grandmother, and Great Great Great Grandmother - all on my Mother’s side.

I loved my Grandma very dearly, just as I did my Grandma on my Dad’s side. Both of these women inspired me to be strong, to reach down deep within myself when things get tough, and to carry on.

In many ways, the women in this photo had hard lives. Their workdays on the farm were long and tiring. There was little time for play and money did not come easy.

As many of you know, my husband Jeff, died of esophageal cancer two and a half years ago. But three months before he died, he had a paralyzing stroke. He lost movement along the entire right side of his body and remained hospitalized. Eventually, with extensive rehab, some of the movement in his hand returned.

As part of his rehab, he had to write a few words each day. He decided to write “I love Carey-Ann.” He wrote this every day until he became too weak to write. His dedication to his physical rehab in the midst of fighting stage 4 terminal cancer was inspirational. But, his dedication to loving me and our daughters was the stuff of storybooks. There may be a lot of things that I still need to learn about in this world, but I have learned a lot about love.

There can come a time in people’s lives, often in their forties or fifties, when they start to wonder who they really are at this stage in the game. These executives may like themselves well enough and feel confident in their abilities, but there may still be a little voice inside of them that says there is something more. If you are feeling this way, you can either ignore that voice and push it away. Tip: It will come back again down the road! Or, you can curiously dive into it.

About 18 months ago, I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I felt like something had to shift in my life, yet so much seemed out of my control. Out of this reflection, came the creation of my new morning ritual. So, what does my morning routine look like and how can you build your own morning ritual?

I love January because it is a great time for new beginnings! A chance to reassess and start new. Yet, statistics show that only 30 percent of people who set New Year’s resolutions actually keep them beyond 3 months. So why are people’s goals falling by the wayside and how can I help you make some important shifts to achieve what you want?

As an Executive Coach, I am a strong believer in people doing their inner work and cultivating greater self-awareness. So, I must say the profound impact that undertaking a home renovation had on me was completely surprising. After all, it is just a material possession.

I will never forget the day the demo team came to my house. I was gathering up a few belongings in my bedroom to get ready to take off for the day when the team began their work. I actually dropped to my knees and cried when I heard the sound of sledgehammers smashing ceramic tile and walls on the floor below me. I was instantly transported back to the moment 18 months earlier my husband took his final breath in my arms.

On the weekend, I was at the park and saw an adorable girl wearing a bright pink t-shit that had the message ‘Girls are Better Than Boys’ written across the front of it in bold letters.

I understand the whole girl power vibe. Both of my children are girls. But, I must say this messaging seemed a bit off. Can you imagine if a little boy was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Boys are better than Girls?” People would be giving his/their parents nasty looks for sure. So if we want to fill the large equality gap that still exists. What is important?

This past weekend, my daughters and I attended a family bereavement retreat. My husband and my daughters’ Dad died two years ago of esophageal cancer. There seems to be a lot of grief in the world right now. So many others have lost loved ones either through COVID-19 or other illnesses and injuries. You may be grieving a relationship that ended in divorce, a job loss or a life that didn’t turn out the way you had planned. And, there is also grieving of life as we knew it before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Role Modelling is so important. I saw this first-hand when I took my daughters to a family bereavement retreat on the weekend as we remembered their Dad/my husband. One of the activities was rock climbing. I went first. My head felt heavy from all of the retreat stuff so when I was on the climbing wall, I didn't push myself too hard. At the first sign of trouble, halfway up the wall, I said I am ready to come down.

Then I watched my girls go up. They stopped at exactly the same spot on the wall I did and then asked to come down. I saw very quickly what was happening here. I immediately asked to be hooked back up

This is the question likely on the minds of most leaders right now. Sure, we made the quick transition in March 2020 of utilizing technology to allow for many employees to work from home. But beyond some of the planning put in place from a business continuity standpoint, has your leadership team actually sat down (yes, virtually) to put a plan in place about what needs to be done to steer your organization in the right direction for the future?

Are you noticing a few extra grey hairs since the COVID-19 pandemic began? Maybe a sore back or just an overall sense of mental unwellness. I think many people are caught in that place of mental languish - not clinically depressed but not really thriving either. If you are feeling this way, you are not alone. But, what do you do about it? And, how can the steps you take right now improve your work and your life?