Introduction

"Being human is not a problem to solve; it's an advantage to harness."

It happened at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. As always, I was at work. I called my mom to ask what time my dad's flight would arrive from Denmark. He was returning to NYC where he was staying with me to continue his chemo treatment for bladder cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering. My mom had decided to stay behind in Denmark after having just gone through radiation for her third bout with breast cancer. Yes, you read that correctly-both my parents were battling cancer at the same time in two different countries.

That morning, she could barely speak. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she couldn't breathe and was on her way to the hospital. It all happened so fast. I told her to hurry. When the call came an hour later, notifying me that she had died in the ambulance at 11:05 a.m., I finished my work, told my team I'd be gone for a few days and went home to prepare to tell my dad about her passing.

I can still remember waiting for my dad to arrive at my apartment. It was the hardest day of my life. My mom had died only a few hours earlier, and with no time to process it, all I could think of was how I was going to tell my dad that she had died alone while he was on a plane.

No matter what I did, I couldn't fix the pain. No matter what I did, I couldn't ignore it either.

The only thing I could do was sit there and wait for him to arrive. And all we could do was cry together once I was finally able to tell him. I didn't get to say goodbye to my mom. I wish in that moment I had told her I loved her but we didn't say those words to each other. Our relationship had always been difficult and remained so even though I was now an adult. As for my dad, he told me they had fought before he left for the airport so he hadn't said a proper good-bye either.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have paused and taken time away from my fast-paced fashion executive job when my mom asked me to meet for lunch or go Christmas shopping with her. I would have taken time off to go back to Denmark and be with her during her treatment. I would have said no to being available 24/7 for business phone calls during dinner with my parents. I would have thanked my mom for ensuring my home was taken care of while I was at work and the two of them awaited their next treatment cycle.

• I would have.
• I could have.
• I should have.

We Don't Have to Accept the Way Things Are

Throughout our early years, we gather beliefs about who we are and what is expected of us while telling ourselves many stories to try to navigate our lives. The problem is that until much later in life, rather than question these beliefs and stories we are told, we tend to accept them as the way things are and the way we should be.

Early on I was trained to believe that my emotions were an inconvenience and it was best to keep my feelings and tears to myself. It ran in the family. My grandfather, a big, burly man who had little time for emotions, was a butcher in Denmark. My great-grandfather was similar to my grandfather, except he was a blacksmith. Growing up, they were my image of what it meant to be resilient. And little me believed that to get through life, I had to be tough like them.

I felt isolated as a kid and was bullied at school. It made me an angry teenager who acted tough to show I didn't care what other people thought about me. Family life was equally disconnected, including several suicide attempts by my mother when I was a teenager, which she would sometimes blame on me for not being a nice and caring daughter. She was bipolar but refused treatment because she thought that meant she would be considered insane. As a teenager, I felt responsible for her moods and behavior and as I progressed into adulthood, I continued to put up a front to ignore the impact of her mental illness. I was what I thought it meant to be tough and resilient, at home, in life, and at work.

Like so many people, my reality was that I had a lot of ideas about what my life "should" be like and who I was "supposed" to be. I adopted different personalities for the simple fact that I wanted to be someone I wasn't and I was hiding my sensitive side. This mindset stuck as I advanced in my career. I worked 24/7 and pushed through challenges by sucking it up and keeping my emotions under wraps to reach my professional goals and what I thought my peers expected of me. The closest I got to any resemblance of "self-care" was taking a little time for lunch, which meant eating at my desk while working and downing coffee to stay awake and energized enough to feel an ounce of motivation.

Unfortunately, I'm not alone in feeling or acting this way. Society has taught us that we have to be focused and resilient to perform at our best. We can't waste time on things that are not related to work, and we believe that expressing our emotions means being overly sensitive, which is often viewed as a weakness. We think showing emotion is opening ourselves to being vulnerable, leaving us open to attacks, and at times, being shamed or leaving us feeling ashamed for having emotions in the first place.

For me though, accepting the way things are-or at least how I envisioned them in my head-came to a full stop the day my mom died, and my father received a terminal diagnosis the same year.

The Painful Wake-Up Call

My dad and I sat together at the doctor's office as we were told that there was nothing left they could do for his cancer and that he only had a few weeks to live. My journey of self-care and definition of what it means to be resilient changed forever over the months that I was the caregiver for my dad as he approached the end of his life. Our conversations transformed me. They were a gift. It was the most difficult and also the most beautiful time of my life. I learned how to be vulnerable and talk about my emotions in a whole new way. We both did. We reminisced about our good times and our most cherished memories while also talking about our past intentions and how we interpreted each other's actions. For example, for 40 years, I never thought we'd actually hugged before and physically embraced in a loving way. I viewed him patting my shoulders when we hugged as him telling me that enough was enough, when in reality, he was trying to convey I was enough and he loved me.

Prior to these conversations, I thought resilience was to ignore my feelings. But this time with my dad opened my eyes to the power of using my feelings as information to cultivate connection and communicate in a way that allowed me not only to understand myself better, but also others. For those five months, we talked about life choices, work, ambitions, goals, regrets, what we care about, what matters in the end, and what it means to love.

As a result, I started asking myself a lot of questions; questions my dad had taught me to ask that allowed for more curiosity, clarity, and courage to emerge. He always told me that the most important skill in life is to learn to listen, truly listen. This is especially true when listening to what we don't say because that's how we start to listen with our heart. I really love this message, and I began practicing it after my parents' deaths. It has changed my life.

I wanted to be of service and I wanted to do work that matters to both me and to others. During this process, for the first time in my life I really dug into myself by asking questions like:

• "How do I want to spend my days?"
• "What would work-life quality look like for me?"
• "What is something I would love doing for years to come?"
• "What would I look back on and be proud to have done or achieved?"
• "What would I do even if I wasn't paid for it?"
• "How do I live a rich life, not abundant in money, but in meaningful relationships, starting with the one I have with myself?"

I realized that always learning and growing was important to me. I loved change and solving problems. My eyes also opened to how much I cared about health, especially mental health because of how my mom's struggle with bipolar disorder had affected my life. Lastly, I wanted work to be an important part of my life. I began to make different choices. I left my job as a burned-out fashion executive, and I went back to school to learn how to help people be healthy and busy at the same time because I think we deserve to have it all.

Two decades have passed since I made that decision. Since that time, my work rethinking self-care at work has taken me into countless boardrooms and family rooms across the globe. I've given talks on the subject on hundreds of stages and worked one-on-one with thousands of coaching clients from CEOs of multinationals to entrepreneurs and start-ups to help them reclaim agency over their lives.

As I turn 60 this year, I still ask a lot of myself. I keep using my own tools to stay curious and to keep learning what I need so that I can keep growing and be at my best as I age. I often thank my body for being good to me as we've become a good team and thoughtful of each other. Minus a few wrinkles and back kinks, today I feel better than I did in my 30s when I was fighting against myself to work harder. I'm no longer willing to...