Important tips and strategies for you, as non-professional (unpaid) caregivers, to reduce overwhelm and frustration, becoming confident and balanced in your caregiving journey.
These come from The Caregiver's Journey, the five-phase program I created and filled with lessons, strategies, and tips I've learned in my thirty-five years experience in roles of caregiving support for family and loved ones - a role I'm still living with my husband, Jack, who now lives in a care community.
I want you to learn faster than I did and I want your journey to be easier than my early journeys were!
This video contains details on three important areas of our caregiving journey:
1. Breaking caregiving down into different roles, responsibilities, and goals.
Reduce overwhelm when you know what you're qualified to do and how to support others who provide care. Create clear goals for yourself and your care receiver that are easy for you to follow and for others who support you to understand and follow with you.
2. Massive acceptance and radical presence.
Accepting this journey fully without the need to like, understand or agree with it. Not judging yourself or the journey. Not wasting energy and emotion that don't help you. Staying fully present in the moment, meeting them where they are, so you celebrate the positive experiences and make wise choices in the challenging experiences.
3. Choose your perspective, choose your experience.
This is YOUR journey. Listen and learn. Don't let anyone else define your journey for you. Research the diagnosis but don't look at your care receiver based on where they may be in their diagnosis. Stay fully present to exactly where they are and meet them where they are in the moment.
Here’s a brief introduction to each of the 5 overlapping phases of The Caregiver's Journey.
1. The Caregiver’s Primer™.
Some of us become caregivers when our loved one receives a diagnosis. Some of us see caregiving on our horizon. Either way, we don’t know what to do. The Caregiver’s Primer™ introduces ways to prepare physically, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally for both our journey ahead and the very beginning of our caregiving journey.
2. The Journey Begins With Me.
Understanding ourselves in a meaningful way helps us harness the potential and power of our personalities, beliefs, values and purpose, so they support - not sabotage - us in our caregiving journey.
3. 5 Steps to Confidently Navigate Your Caregiving Journey.
When we become caregivers, we instantly go from not knowing either about being a caregiver or our care receiver’s diagnosis, to wanting a Ph.D. - in both! This phase is the “user manual” for navigating our roles, responsibilities, and experiences during our caregiving journey so we, our care receiver, and those around us have our most positive and supported journeys.
4. The Grace of Grief™.
We grieve during our caregiving journey and after our loved one is gone. Learning how to feel grief purely, and understanding its purpose in our lives, strengthens us. It develops our resilience, gives us perspective, and deepens our wisdom. We learn how to use the insights of our grief to support us moving forward in our lives and living our purpose.
5. Moving Forward.
We intentionally make choices during our caregiving journey that shift how we live our lives while we’re caregivers. When our journey is through it’s sometimes hard for us to give ourselves permission to move forward from them - or to know what we want. Our choices served us in a season of our lives and now it’s time for us to venture out into who we are today. Learn how to move forward with curiosity and joy, not guilt and uncertainty, knowing we’re meant to thrive in our lives.
We're in this together. Let's have a conversation!
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